How to Be a Woman Online by Nina Jankowicz

Author:Nina Jankowicz [Jankowicz, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350267589
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

Before we get into the nitty gritty details of social media policy, it’s important to understand that navigating it really can help you. Employing a knowledge of social media platforms’ terms and tools was critical when Leta Hong Fincher, an American journalist and scholar who is an expert on feminism in contemporary China, was bombarded with sexualized harassment after criticizing forced marriages in Xinjiang in summer 2020. She says she felt like “a tsunami was raging on top” of her.7 “There were people calling me a multitude of sexualized insults, misogynistic insults … there have been people threatening to gang rape me and rape me and referring to my children,” she recalls.8 Leta’s abusers created multiple fake profiles impersonating her. Her trolls took to other platforms, too, including Leta’s Amazon page, where they left inauthentic reviews of her books. Typically, Leta would block abusive accounts like these without a second thought, but in this instance, “there were so many different accounts attacking me at the same time and I just couldn’t get on top of it.” She wondered aloud on Twitter, “Is it any wonder that most women prefer not to call out harassers publicly?”9

She does credit Twitter with some response; as I’ll detail later, after an email exchange with a Twitter employee and a public awareness campaign led by the Coalition for Women in Journalism, the platform began taking action against some of the abuse and verified Leta’s account to guard against further impostors. But women without the profile, resources, or volition to escalate evidence of abuse may not have been able to achieve this result. “I know that Twitter responded to my complaints very quickly compared to a lot of other people, and I think that probably had to do with the people that I know. I got a personal introduction to the correct person at Twitter to handle that complaint, which most people wouldn’t have,” Leta says.

Whenever I see content on any platform that might violate the terms of service, I report it. Generally, these reports disappear into the ether; when the platforms do follow up with me, it is usually to tell me something to the effect of “we’re sorry, but we found no violation of terms” in the rape threat you received. (Apparently, they do not believe “I’m going to rape you with a bag over your head” is targeted harassment.) Members of focus groups I have conducted have reported similarly frustrating experiences. So, when I reviewed Twitter replies to Leta from the period of the campaign against her, I was shocked at how many pieces of content had been removed and how many accounts were suspended or terminated entirely. This speaks to Brianna Wu’s key advice: “read through the terms of service of the platform you’re being harassed on,” she tells me. On Twitter, for example, which has explicit policies against targeted harassment of trans people and deadnaming—when a trans person’s previous name is used—reporting such content should get it removed immediately. “Read through those terms of service and understand when you’ve got them dead to rights,” says Brianna.

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