Don’t Let it Stand

Twitter is a super public platform where pretty much everything you say is visible to pretty much everybody else. So it’s no surprise that many women feel they need a break — either temporary or permanent — from the harassment they face on Twitter.

In 2012, actress Priyanka Chopra took a hiatus from Twitter after a slew of harassment. She wrote

Hi Everyone.. Sorry i disappeared. I was very hurt by a few haters who i seem to expose myself to by tweeting [sic].

But she figured that it wasn’t all hate, and that the love might be worth it. Cautiously, she returned.

But then i also realised how much luv most of u have shown me..So here I am..cautious..but real..love to all who share love..cause thats all I’m here to do..for anyone else..c ya! [sic]

In a demonstration of this love, her fans created the hashtag #WeLovePriyankaChopra, which trended worldwide.

But you know, that’s Priyanka Chopra. Not everyone gets that kind of support, or a hashtag.

TV presenter and writer Melissa Harris-Perry receives tons of abuse on Twitter, and as a result, has stopped using the platform very often. She says,

I am at a point where I don't retweet anything that I really like because I fear that I would send all of my haters, all of the harassment that comes to me, over to some person who doesn't deserve it.

Melissa says she feels her inability to participate in Twitter is ‘quieting [her] digital voice’.

Similarly, news presenter Sagarika Ghose, who used to be very vocal on Twitter on a range of political subjects, for a while decided to stick to tweets about programmes on her news channel. She explains:

This is the social media version of gang-rape. They threaten you with rape and public stripping and beating. They are brave when anonymous, and hunt in packs.

Not everyone is even able to continue using the platform at all. Writer and feminist Lena Dunham is one of them. She says in an interview with The Guardian,

I deleted Twitter because I’m trying to create a safer space for myself emotionally. People threaten my life and tell me what a cow I am, so I decided I was gonna […] check it occasionally, but it’s not the same co-dependence Twitter and I once shared. It’s the dark side of the internet. There’s a lot of people I love on Twitter, but unfortunately you can’t read those without reading deranged Neocons telling you you should be buried under a pile of rocks.

While Lena still has her Twitter account, she’s deleted the app from her phone, and if she wants to share something online, she sends the tweet to a trusted friend to post.

Some topics tend to attract particularly high levels of abuse. In 2011, British writer Helen Lewis wrote in the New Statesman

On the whole, I’ve managed to avoid the worst threats and misogyny that other women writers endure but I don’t think that’s luck or because my opinions are well-argued. I think it’s because, very early on, I became conscious of how my opinions would be received and began watering them down, or not expressing them at all. I noticed that making feminist arguments led to more abuse and, as a result, I rarely wrote about feminism at all.

Seven years later, feminism is still a topic that seemingly accrues the worst types of online hate.

A 2015 article in the Washington Post speaks about the mental and emotional costs of online abuse for feminists. Some women have taken several steps away from the interwebs as a result of this.

In 2013, when American pro-choice activist Jaclyn Munson wrote about going undercover at an anti-abortion pregnancy centre, she began to receive numerous death threats from a stalker. A year and a ton of threats later, she pretty much gave up publishing her writing online and deleted her Twitter account. She explains:

It was just becoming really emotionally overwhelming to be on the front lines all the time.

For many women and gender minorities, speaking on the Internet really is like being on the front lines of a war, in which the battle scars are sometimes too much to bear.

American writer Hayley Krischer used to run a blog about feminism and motherhood, but shut it down after the comments got out of control.

I spent so much time blocking nasty people saying nasty things, it just wasn’t worth it. Part of me felt like I needed to be fair, so I tried to moderate and respond, but it took up so much time and emotional energy. Then I wrote one post about the movie Maleficent and a rape scene and the negative response was so overwhelming, I just thought, “Fuck this, I don’t need this.”

Namrata, interviewed for Don’t Let it Stand, talks about her early days of blogging, when she ran a blog tracing the history of a feminist movement. The blog had very few readers, but it was here that she received ‘three explicit rape threats [where they spoke about] hunting me down and raping me, slitting my throat and raping me.’

Following these threats, Namrata shut down her blog, and only re-entered online public platforms much later. She says of her experiences across the Internet:

Talking about rape means that people say you deserve rape.

Emily McCombs is the executive director of young feminist website xojane, ‘where women go to be their unabashed selves’. Specialising in raw, first-person narratives, xojane is a beautiful project – but one where not many writers last. Emily says in an interview with the Washington Post

We bring someone here, we develop them, they are able to make their name and their brand online, and the first chance they get they go somewhere safer, like print. Part of that is definitely not being able to handle the harassment […]. I’ve watched a lot of women in this industry burn out.

In 2014, another abortion rights activist, Lauren Rankin, pulled back from writing online and in large part from Twitter.

I don’t like the idea that it seems like I was scared or intimidated away from the Internet. But I think I’ve recentered why I do what I do, in ways that I can maintain my mental sanity. Unfortunately, that really doesn’t involve the Internet as much.

Feministe is one of the oldest feminist blogs around, and after years of relentless abuse, its creator Lauren Bruce no longer has any online presence at all.

I had to completely cut that part off in order to live the rest of my life. In order to work, have a nice family and feel like I was emotionally whole, I could not have one foot planted in a toxic stew.

When 24-year-old blogger Agratha Dinakaran wrote a blog post accusing Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan of plagiarising content from JK Rowling’s speech, she was entirely unprepared for the shitstorm that was about to be unleashed.

After a few inoffensive, random messages from strangers, a representative of Shah Rukh’s PR firm wrote his own blog post. She writes of the incident

It seemed to give wings to the desperate Shahrukh fans who really couldn't figure out a way to defend their idol. Instead of logically arguing with me on Twitter, I had fans who splashed that link all across Twitter while spewing all kinds of inappropriate words at me.

Fans took to Twitter and spread the link to her personal blog far and wide. They then flocked to both her blog and Twitter profile in rage.

While many abusers deleted their tweets after the media’s coverage of the backlash, she managed to screenshot two of the ‘kinder’ ones.

I could only take in so much, and after a point, I ended up having a nervous breakdown. I have never been subjected to hate in such a heinous manner before and somehow, I couldn't cope with this kind of bullying. I apparently wasn't strong as I thought I was, and I was suddenly filled with fear.

Agratha deleted her Facebook account after someone sent her a message detailing a family member’s workplace address. She couldn’t leave the house for ages due to incessant threats, and was constantly worried for her family members and friends.

I probably faced less than 1% of cyberbullying than most other victims around the world did. But that was bad enough for me. Enough for me to go into "digital hiding". Enough for me to stay locked inside my house. Enough for me to experience, for the first time, to fear for my life.

She feels the hardest lesson she learned was about free speech.

The experience was painful and harrowing but it was more depressing to learn that this is what free speech in this country means […]. It means that if you lend your support to anything that is morally right but remotely controversial, you will be forced into silence.

Today, she’s cautiously making her way back online, but like many other women, she closely guards what she does.

I’m trying to put it behind me, and moving on. Still, I am cautious about where I go, what I do online and try to protect as much as information about myself that I can.