Social Media has made harassment acceptable

And we should absolutely not be okay with that

The Irritating Gentleman by Berthold Woltze

A man I used to be acquainted with (and you will see why he’s somebody I used to know in a few seconds) and I were talking at an event a few years ago. It was a day I was feeling particularly down and though I was trying to be upbeat, he noticed. He asked me what was wrong. I said that morning I had received a disturbingly graphic death threat and the anxiety that came with it was making me a bit jumpy. His response was to laugh and say, “Oh don’t worry, those people hardly ever act on that stuff anyway. Besides,“ he added as he took a sip of his drink, “this is just a price women have to pay if you’re going to have public platforms and have controversial opinions.” I frowned at this and said, “What controversial opinions do I have?“

He shrugged, “Oh they’re not controversial to me, but lots of people find discussions about women’s rights really annoying especially after Me Too. Anyway, this kind of thing is just expected on the internet isn’t it? People send death threats and rape threats out all the time.“

I’m not sure what disturbed me more, his cavalier attitude to something as serious as a death threat or the idea that women should expect them if we exist publicly online and dare to have opinions about our own rights. Or the fact that this was coming from a man who declared himself a feminist as he was a father to two young daughters.

It’s no secret that somewhere along the way, people began to treat online harassment as though its something less serious and less concerning, but the idea that we should actually expect to be harassed if we exist online for our gender, sexuality, race, disability feels like it has only devolved into something worse every year. The lack of moderation on these platforms has made it even easier for bad actors to brigade people and as a whole, we have all become used to strangers shouting the most vile abuse and threats at us on the internet. No wonder we have so much anxiety and depression in our society today - the moral fibre of a culture is measured by our humanity towards each other. And one thing social media seems to have removed with a digital scalpel is the capacity of seeing the other person behind the screen as a real human being.

Back when I worked in care, there is a story I once heard from an elderly gentleman who had served in the second world war. He spoke about how much easier it was to shoot an enemy from a distance than it was to shoot them up close. “You see, when you saw their face and heard them talk, and recognised the humanity in them was the same as the humanity in you, it felt wrong and unjust to shoot this other human being. You wondered if they had a child waiting for them to come home. You thought about their grieving mother if you killed them. But from a distance? It was easier to dissuade yourself from all of that.“

As someone deeply anti war, I often think about this story when I think about the humanity that we have all been gifted with, to recognise the humanity first in another person, especially when you see them face to face. The removal of that face to face interaction makes it so much easier for people to be cruel to one another. We forget that there is a human being sitting on the other end of that screen. We set aside the idea for a minute that every single one of us contains multitudes and we shouldn’t treat anyone the way we would not want to be treated. Combine all that with algorithms that push outrage and hatred for the sake of engagement and you now have people like my ex acquaintance say that this is to be expected. That harassment is just a norm if you exist online as a woman. So where do we draw the line then?

I’ll tell you where we haven’t drawn the line. For years, women and girls have been speaking out about online harassment and deep fake revenge porn being made, how dangerous this is as it is being used to silence women, especially because of how often this disturbing revenge porn targets minors which has tragic real world consquences. But because we have got used to women being harassed on the internet those concerns have been swept under the rug as just “something that happens on the internet“. By protecting the right of misogynists to create this type of revenge pornography instead of valuing women and girls safety, we have finally reached the point of massive virality of violent pornographic deepfakes being made of famous women without their consent - and a certain demographic of internet users defending this as not illegal so they should be allowed to do it. It has taken getting to THIS point for the US government to even call for a few regulations around deepfakes, despite the startling statistic that 96% of deepfake technology is used to create revenge pornography of women without their consent. Can you see how the moral fibre of a society declines by allowing this kind of harassment to thrive?

As someone who has existed on the internet for a long time now, I have watched as people have ignored internet harassment as “real harassment“ and turned women’s safety into “if you can’t handle it, leave the internet” something which is near impossible in today’s day and age. But what I do promise you is this, the best way we can protect our humanity at this point is limiting our social media usage, pressure these platforms to take harassment much more seriously and treating social media the way we treat our real life and real people. Every single one of us has a right to dignity and to live a life where we aren’t perpetually anxious about our safety or strangers screaming at us simply for existing - to truly love this world is to see the cracks and learn how to mend them instead of just allowing them to get worse. And no, the price of being a woman anywhere, whether on the internet or in real life, should never ever be to expect the harassment and abuse of strangers.