Many on the internet were shocked and appalled when Leslie Jones, star of the recent blockbuster Ghostbusters, started retweeting some of the racist and misogynistic abuse she has been receiving in recent days. But just as there were articles and tweets going out standing in solidarity with Jones and expressing outrage at the abuse, there were those who quickly wrote it off.
Some said the tweets were just mean pranks by kids, others said they were “to be expected” for the internet, even more criticized Jones for supposedly “encouraging” trolls by not ignoring them.
But many other women of color – especially black women – on the internet face the same abuse that Jones is now facing, and we will tell you that this isn’t a harmless prank, this isn’t about hurt feelings or even the sting of a racist comment. This is a deliberate campaign of abuse perpetrated on us to keep us off of the internet, and it needs to be taken seriously.
I remember the first time I noticed coordinated attacks against me. One day, a few years ago, I started suddenly receiving a large amount of hate-filled tweets from people who appeared to be neo-Nazis. Dozens of tweets from people with swastikas in their profile pictures were comparing me to gorillas, calling me a welfare queen, showing pictures of hanged black men and women, calling me every racial slur out there and some that may have just been invented that day for those very tweets.
Yes, I had received racist tweets in the past – at least a few each day, but this was different. This was a sea of hate doing its best to engulf me. Finally, one of my followers sent me a link that explained what was happening– somebody had created a thread about me on a neo-Nazi site. I had some tweets about race that had been picked up by national press, and this neo-Nazi group had decided that this was too much legitimacy for a black woman to have, so they fired up their troops with screenshots of my tweets and information about where to find me on social media. Their goal was to harass me off of the internet because my voice was considered a threat.
That was the first campaign of many, and whenever I find myself drowning in racist and sexist vitriol, a quick Google search will usually find a group working hard to create and sustain the abuse that I’m receiving. This is never organic, this is never an accident – it is a purposeful campaign every time. I have reported hundreds of such abusive tweets and Facebook comments, but can count the number of times that Twitter or Facebook have determined that these horribly violent racist and misogynistic messages violate their policy on one hand. I have blocked over 60,000 people on Twitter, and yet still, every day abuse comes.
I am certainly not alone. Every day, black women like Feminista Jones, Franchesca Ramsey, Melissa Harris-Perry, Imani Gandy, Jamilah Lemieux and countless others – women whose very presence helps make social media profitable for corporations like Facebook and Twitter, women who’s insightful social commentary draw millions of people to these platforms – face regular, coordinated campaigns of abuse aimed at forcing them off of the internet.
So when Leslie Jones was receiving a deluge of racist and misogynistic tweets, it was no surprise to me or any other woman of color on the internet to see professional abusers like Milo Yiannopoulos and the rest of the staff at Brietbart gleefully doing their best to encourage abuse from their millions of followers who also see loud black women as a threat and a source of what they view as their denied birthright of power and respect as white men.
This woman, this dark-skinned black woman – who didn’t even have the courtesy to be “conventionally” attractive by their standards – had the audacity to star in an all-female remake of a beloved white-dude film? Of course she must pay by being forced off of the internet – a platform essential to those in public life today.
These abusers know the power of the internet, and it’s access to that power that they hope to consolidate for themselves and deny women like Jones with their abuse. For many of us, our very livelihoods are at stake. My writing career is dependent on the internet. This is the same for many women, people of color, disabled people, and LGBT people who have long been denied access to traditional press.
When Milo Yiannopoulos lost his Twitter verified status due to previous campaigns of horrific abuse against women and people of color on the internet, he didn’t chalk it up to “the cost of being on the internet” – he went to the White House to complain. He knows that the internet is vital to his work as a public figure – even if that work consists mainly of harassing other people out of that public sphere. “Is there anything the president can do to encourage Silicon Valley to remind them of the critical importance of open free speech in our society?” Yiannopoulos asked.
But it is that very same free speech that Yiannopoulos and others work to deny marginalized populations on social media with their campaigns of abuse. They do not have the power to cut off our access to the internet outright, so they will instead make it unbearable for us to be there. They are complicit enablers of the thousands of angry, hateful “trolls” who bombard us with rape threats, racist slurs, images of torture and abuse.
When trolls traumatize us until the cost is too high, we remove ourselves from the public sphere. And when that happens, we are being silenced not only by the hordes of white men who want to bully us out of public life, but by the corporations who make millions off of our contributions to social media. It is time for Twitter and Facebook to step up and embody the commitment to free access and free speech that they claim to hold dear.