"She's such a 🐍": Can we STOP throwing abuse at women online?

So, I wonder if the cast of Love Island are catching up on Twitter today. Kem will soon learn he's 'best mate/husband goals', Chris has been called a ‘hero’ and Marcel is a ‘legend’. His girlfriend, Gabby, however, can look forward to comments such as 'the biggest snake', ‘scouse twat’ and 'game playing whore bag'. Why has she earned this level of vitrol online? The fact that she's a woman.

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Harassment is a fairly common occurrence for lots of woman on social media. Take Laura, a 17 year-old book blogger who reviews young adult novels on her YouTube channel. About a year ago, a man sent her his self-published ebook for review. To keep her to-do pile manageable, Laura doesn’t accept self-published titles but as soon as she turned the request down, she started to receive harassment from multiple anonymous Twitter users, plus strange emails detailing the author’s desire to marry her. Let’s remind ourselves that Laura is a schoolgirl. It quickly transpired numerous other female book bloggers had received the same correspondence.

That’s a chilling, extreme example but last week, I tweeted if any women had stories about online abuse - and the overwhelming response was: ‘What woman DOESN’T have stories about online harassment?’ And although we wouldn’t tolerate it in real life, we seem oddly calm about bearing the brunt of online hate. What's that about?

If you’re not familiar with the phrase ‘Gamergate’, you should be because it highlights how precarious women are online. In 2014, after dumping her boyfriend, Zoë Quinn – who worked in the male-dominated computer games industry – fell victim to a sustained online hate campaign including rape threats, death threats and ‘doxing’ (leaking private information). One female games journalist told me: “[Gamergate] stopped women feeling like they could give their opinion on anything that mattered to the trolls, which in this case was games. It was a backlash to a perceived intrusion into a perceived male only space. It caused a lot of trauma.”

A single tweet about how I loved the film Wonder Woman, proves her point. Within minutes, I was attacked for being a woman 'daring' to have an opinion on a comic book character. As my profile has risen, I’ve found myself exposed to the ‘dark side’ of Twitter. Because I’m a transgender woman, much of my abuse is transphobic in nature, but not all.

A few weeks ago, I visited a school to talk to 300 young people about feminism. That night, I noticed that my Instagram inbox had 12 unread messages. They were all from teenage boys at that school, accusing me of being a ‘feminazi’. I then searched my name on Twitter and found they’d been sending similar messages there, but my security settings had filtered them out. It wasn’t the first time I'd been sent misogynist messages on Twitter, but it was disturbing, and disheartening, that young men felt empowered to send violent threats. A couple of weeks before that, comments I made in a magazine interview were quoted out of context and I was told to delete my account and that I should ‘kill myself’.

Because computers, phones and tablets – Charlie Brooker’s black mirrors – do not look like humans, we forget that tweets, posts and pictures came from a real life person. Every time someone told me I was trash, it hurt. It was real. Sure, perhaps as a journalist, I should toughen up. But then I think, 'why should I have to?'

I’m not the only one. Podcaster extraordinaire Emma Gannon has been met with a barrage of sexist abuse since she featured in a TV ad for Microsoft. Various author friends live on Facebook under different names to shield themselves from men who repeatedly seek them out and send creepy messages. And we all saw the brand of racism and misogyny Diane Abbott experienced in the run up to the general election in June.

So what can social media platforms do to make sites a 'nicer' place for women? A source at Twitter tells me they're in the process of rolling out measures that will shield women from likely trolls. “We stand for freedom of expression. That’s put in jeopardy when abuse and harassment stifle and silence those voices. We won’t tolerate it, and we’re launching new efforts to stop it.” These measures include preventing suspended users from creating new accounts, filtering abusive terms and, vitally, tackling offensive tweets even if they haven’t been reported. I have reported hate speech, and seen users blocked. I’d urge you to do the same if it happens to you.

But here’s the thing: Twitter isn’t sending hateful tweets, its users are. And why are people so vile online? Jesse Fox, assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Ohio State University believes there are eight key reasons, including perceived anonymity and lack of consequences - also assuming everyone feels the same way as you and that you’re surrounded by ‘friends’. She also points to desensitisation. Social media can be so brutal, and we've got used to that tone in our discourse.

My point? We need to be kinder to each other. Feminism isn’t about agreeing with everything another woman might have to say, but I wonder if we can improve our online lives by changing the way we talk to other women. The language and vocabulary we use is key. I get that it's tempting to send that sassy tweet; to say a celeb looks like sh*t on the red carpet; to subtweet about someone who’s pissed you off. In future, I’m going to do my bit to keep social media nice, and sit on my hands.