Women Writing Digitally: Fighting the Online Culture of Hate
by Amy Winter
Harassment, threats, and other forms of bad behavior are not new on the internet. But last spring, the especially violent feedback often received by female and/or feminist bloggers exploded into the mainstream press. In an article in The Guardian last April, Jessica Valenti (editor of Feministing) describes the experience of technology consultant and blogger Kathy Sierra:
“Last week, Kathy Sierra, a well-known software programmer and Java expert, announced that she had cancelled her speaking engagements and was "afraid to leave my yard" after being threatened with suffocation, rape and hanging. The threats didn't come from a stalker or a jilted lover and they weren't responses to a controversial book or speech. Sierra's harassers were largely anonymous, and all the threats had been made online.
Sierra had been receiving increasingly abusive comments on her website, Creating Passionate Users, over the previous year, but had not expected them to turn so violent-- her attackers not only verbally assaulting her…but also posting photomontages of her on other sites: one with a noose next to her head and another depicting her screaming with a thong covering her face. Since she wrote about the abuse on her website, the harassment has increased. "People are posting all my private data online everywhere - social-security number, and home address - a retaliation for speaking out."
An article from the March/April 2007 issue of Colorlines Magazine reports the similar experience of a young lesbian blogger of color:
Kortney Ryan Ziegler, 25, shut down her blog, Blac(k)ademic, because of the onslaught of negative comments she received last summer. Ziegler…blogged under her alter ego, Nubian, about the racism, sexism, and homophobia she experiences and observes in her life and in the media.
“I just think people really don’t want to hear the truth…They instead attack you on your character, your writing style, and not your argument. They distract from what you just said by saying you can’t spell, or that you should have put a comma there,” said Ziegler… “Every time I would log on to read the comments, there was always something hurtful,” said Ziegler. “And it got me thinking, ‘Wow, I put myself out there. There’s my photograph. There’s my school information…’ I felt more vulnerable, not being anonymous. I now don’t have any pictures on my blog, or my name.” (Colorlines Magazine, “The Segregated Blogosphere” by Celina R. DeLeón, March/April 2007)
Several articles quoted a study from the University of Maryland last year which showed that users with identifiable female screen names receive 25 times more harassment than others, and www.haltabuse.org reports that 70% of the victims of cyberharassment and cyberstalking are female. Such harassment and the fear it generates can materially affect women’s lives. From a Washington Post article:
“Robert Scoble, a technology blogger who took a week off in solidarity with Sierra, said women have told him that harassment is a "disincentive" to participate online. That, he said, will affect their job prospects in the male-dominated tech industry. "If women aren't willing to show up for networking events, either offline or online, then they're never going to be included in the industry," he said.
In August, at least one feminist online discussion forum was hacked, its discussion threads--some of which dated back several years--were deleted and filled with pornography, and the usernames and passwords of registered users were stolen. At least one user’s email was hacked, and used to send violent emails and pornographic images to everyone in her address book, and another user reported an attempt to break into her Paypal account.* This behavior is especially ironic in light of the fact that “freedom of speech” is so often used to defend pornography; however, its proponents seem to feel no compunction about denying freedom of speech to women and feminists online.
The Sydney Morning Herald covered the story:
“An internet war is being fought against the online feminist community by a hive of crackers and tech geeks who call themselves “Anonymous”.
Feminist forums have been hacked, passwords have been stolen, emails have been commandeered and used for whatever nefarious purpose the cyber miscreants wish. Websites…have been forced to shut down. One outspoken woman who blogged anonymously even had her photo put up on the net and a hunt was undertaken by members of “Anonymous” for her place of residence…
…it’s not surprising that those who joined the raids used methods such as vicious hate speech, threats of rape and murder and seeding comment threads with child porn in an attempt to silence women on the web…
The culprits can’t be traced because they often mask their IP addresses with an anonymiser, which hides their location and their computer information. Internet laws are notoriously fraught and even if you are able to find out who is responsible it’s difficult to prosecute...
Whether the attacks are for kicks, to get a rise out of feminists or for a more sinister purpose doesn’t matter. The outcome is the same: women’s voices are silenced and their mobility, visibility and participation on the net is reduced.”
However, feminist bloggers have rallied to fight this abuse, turning to organizations like Working to Halt Online @buse , which is working against online harassment “through education of the general public, education of law enforcement personnel, and empowerment of victims.” One feminist blogger, Lost Clown at Angry for a Reason, published a list of known sites that help people mask their online identity (‘anonymizers’), along with instructions on how feminist bloggers and site managers can refuse access to requests coming from known anonymizers. Another blogger, B at Modern Feminist, discussing a proposed online code of conduct, laments the fact that this kind of violent, abusive behavior causes some bloggers, like Kortney, to stop writing online:
“I don't suppose much will change. Haters will go on publishing personal information - from Kathy Sierra to the Duke lacrosse accuser - and we'll go on moderating comments. And we'll continue to lose valuable writers, videographers, and insight. A code of conduct won't do shit, in my opinion, and I wouldn't adopt it if a hierarchy of bloggers spits one out. Some brave women will continue to speak out and many of us will not. The risk remains too great, and the Duke case further cements that. I'm less afraid online than I am in public space, but I know that's not the case for many these days, and that too makes me sad.”
While still others, like Heart at Women’s Space/The Margins, have used the harassment and ugliness as a call for collective action and feminist solidarity:
“Women, we have to rise up. We are terrorized in our homes, we are terrorized in the streets, everywhere in our world. And we are terrorized on the internet. We have to care about, and save, our own lives. We’ve got to build something different for our own sake, for the sake of the women we love, for the sake of the great river of women which came before us, women who gave all they could and had to make a better world for us, their daughters, to inhabit. We have to build for the sake of our baby girls and our granddaughters, and all women, men, children, animals, growing things, all life, for the whole planet.”
Some ways women can protect ourselves online:
- Consider using a pseudonym when writing or commenting.
- Be cautious about revealing personally identifying or otherwise sensitive information about yourself.
- Create different passwords for different online activities, so if a hacker steals your password for one site, he won’t be able to use it to break into other accounts you may have.
- Consider turning off blog comments, or limiting comments to registered users only. I have never allowed comments on my blog and fortunately to date have been subject to only one cluster of vicious hate mail (in response to my criticism of the anti-fat policies of Southwest Airlines).
- Become tech savvy, and ask tech savvy women for help to make our sites, blogs, and forums more secure.
But the reality is that, just as with rape, this is not primarily an issue of women protecting ourselves; what’s needed is a transformation of the culture that legitimates and accepts violent, racist, misogynist abuse. Violence against women, whether material or virtual, will not change significantly for the better until capitalist white supremacist patriarchy does.
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*Paypal is a service used for online financial transactions and purchases.
Amy Winter is a radical lesbian feminist blogger and the webspinster at feminist reprise, a radical feminist archive and online feminist resource. You can read her blog here.