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No woman is safe on Twitter Online trolls have serious mummy issues

(Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)

(Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)


April 21, 2022   5 mins

When the journalist Leta Hong Fincher wrote about forced marriages in Xinjiang, she was bombarded with online abuse for weeks. Games designer Brianna Wu was driven from her home during an online campaign against sexism in her industry. The account of playwright and activist Van Badham was hacked and fake sexualised images of her were distributed to hundreds of thousands of people.

Nina Jankowicz’s trenchant short book How to Be a Woman Online is packed with similar examples of misogyny blooming on the internet, drawn not just from her personal experience but from her academic research. “To be a woman online,” she demonstrates, “is an inherently dangerous act.”

It would be easy to stop there. Instead, Jankowicz supplies a whole toolkit of ideas for protection. Get cyber secure. Invest in a password manager. Use governance. Employ ‘blocktivism’. Find the mute key. Establish a network of women allies. Amplify them. Be intersectional. Mentor. Be Mentored. Above all, get back out there. The internet is a public forum to which women ought to have equal access. It’s the job of any thinking woman to keep claiming it.

Nina Jankowicz is a committed, North American, second-wave feminist. She quotes Madeline Albright. Her examples are women “with a public presence online”, blue-tick Tweeters, up-and-out-there bloggers, leaners-in. Her enemies, by and large, are men: ‘reply guys’, @ProfessorEsq, @LazyLogan, @TrojanHorace. Her arguments centre on possession of the public sphere: authority, property, occupying space. Correspondingly, the inner sphere is of less interest: psychology is for solving individual pain. Getting out there, Jankowicz acknowledges, will hurt. Own it. Tell your family. Get a therapist.

It’s all admirable stuff: solidly researched, informative, grounded, gritty, practical; as is Jankowicz and the women she knows and champions. But staring at the Twitter feed in front of me, and my long unused account, I find it hard to apply her advice. My feed is of a particular sort: literary, lefty, education-heavy, and disproportionally written by people who also write the news. It’s not that there’s a shortage of misogyny or bullying on show: on the contrary, other than the odd picture of a sunlit cat, it is a cavalcade of images of women and dissections of power plays. But rather than the outer sphere, it seems mostly concerned with perceptions, identity, feelings and psychology. To put it another way, Twitter seems lately to be a psychodrama, much of it about itself.

Take, for example, the story of Sarah Moulds, a woman who kicked a horse on video in late 2021. A deluge of tweets rapidly ensured she lost her job and reputation and would be prosecuted by the RSPCA. There was unquestionably, too, a gendered element to her demonisation: a male hunter with a whip would have been treated to different metaphors. But Moulds’s persecutors weren’t male trolls or reply guys. Many of them were privileged, educated, middle-aged, and female: Jankowitz’s victims rather than persecutors.

They hated, though, with all the vigour of Van Badham’s pursuers. The condemnation went on for days after it became clear that Moulds had young children and had gone into hiding; that she had been punished up to and beyond our usual limits and must be in danger of her life. It went on with particular, almost religious righteousness. One user with “hates bullies” on their bio vowed to “keep hunting for her like she did foxes”. They would not be remonstrated with. “You’d think you’d be safe, wouldn’t you,” tweeted a member of the caring professions, “criticising someone for hitting and kicking an animal but app not”. ‘Safe’ in that sentence has evolved well past Jankowicz’s cyber security tips. Its means something uniquely Twitter.

Twitter evolves. Part of the brilliance of its model is that it mirrors the dynamics of sexual reproduction. A popular tweet doesn’t just acquire likes and retweets exponentially, a snowball rolling down a hill, but also inserts itself, like a thread of protein, into the feed of the people who retweet it. It becomes part of that tweeter’s billboard to the world, their bowerbird display, their DNA. It calls to other tweeters, and it begets new tweets marked by its style. All of which is dynamic, fun, and deeply human.

As Twitter the joint organism has evolved, and its potential for shaming has been revealed, so too has its underlying bias towards a particular quality: innocence. If what you retweet shows the world who you are, and the consequences of being the wrong sort of person are dire, then a need is created for something not just appealing and colourful to place in your feed, but for something that is guaranteed to be harmless, something that will bolster the retweeter’s safety: a neophyte’s plea, a child’s painting or hand-turned salad bowl. Emergency Kittens. A Quokka Every Hour. As I wrote this paragraph, for example, a pleasant-looking woman posted a photo with the caption “I was told by a date this week that he was disappointed when he saw me. So here I am with zero filters, or any photo enhancements” — and acquired 40,000 likes. It had no joke, no politics, no special cleverness: Twitter had selected solely it for its innocence, just as a peahen picks out the longest tailed peacock for its mate.

The problem with peahens fixating on tail length, though, as Darwin pointed out, is that selective breeding means the tails themselves grow to a useless length. On Twitter we have tweets, threads, and entire profiles which are peacocks’ tails of innocence: primarily performative. There is also a special problem with reproducing innocence: it cannot perform itself without becoming knowing. Nor can it plan its own appearance. It has to be always on its debut, forced into a new position by the force of its feelings, which is why so many tweets begin with statements of helplessness: “I can’t stop thinking about…”, “Can’t unsee this!”, “I had a cry!”

There is another particular problem with innocence: it’s disproportionately bad for women. It plays into enormous, basic, cross-cultural prejudices against women’s maturity, humour, experience, cleverness, overt sexuality and knowingness. It feeds into deep binaries about virgins and whores, good girls and bad girls, Cinderellas and ugly sisters, fairy godmothers and evil stepmothers. Behind that lurks our deepest binary, the one that any psychologist or two-year-old will tell you is often embodied in one person: good mother/bad mother.

Twitter, as we all know, loves binaries too. In the time I took to get this paragraph, the popular tweet with the unfiltered face had been rammed by a fleet of replies accusing it of lying and ugliness. The tweet was hidden, and the original tweeter had protected her account. (She later unlocked it.) Innocence and sweetness had to be accompanied by its opposite: design and corruption, as if we were all in a Jacobean drama.

The hatred of Sarah Moulds was also sharpened by a good mother/bad mother binary. She wasn’t the good carer of horses and children she was dressed to seem, therefore she was entirely evil and deserved to be hunted to death.

So I believe was the hatred of me. I once had a popular Twitter account where I put poems by my young students online. The poems were ‘safe’ to retweet because — as well as being good texts — they were innocent. I rarely, if ever, tweeted anything personal or even retweeted other peoples views. I tried, in fact, to have as little personality as possible: I thought it could only get in the way of the young people’s poems. But my face did float in the blue Madonna bubble, and I was aware that many people thought I was much better than I was, an angelic person who spent all her time among the disadvantaged. In fact, my teaching was only one of the strands of my work. I worked with lots of people and I was motivated by many things, including intellectual curiosity. But I was not the opposite of an angel either. I didn’t abuse anyone, or dox anyone, or run a cruel classroom, or force children to write poems or make money out of poems. (Actually, I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to force children to write good poems, or possible to make money out of any poems.)

That dark opposite came from the Good Mother/Bad Mother binary, and from Twitter, just as the persecution of Sarah Moulds did, and the persecution of many other women, good, bad, but mostly indifferent, mostly just human. I’d very much like to be safe from all that, but I think we may be too far gone, and that even a book as thorough as Nina Jankowicz’s cannot take us there.

A new edition of Kate Clanchy’s Some Kids I taught and What They Taught Me is available now from Swift Press. 


Kate Clanchy is a poet, author, and teacher. Some Kids I taught and What They Taught Me is available now from Swift Press.

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Claire D
Claire D
2 years ago

We, women, xx chromosome ones, seem to have two choices; complain endlessly about how unfair the world is, insisting on our universal victimhood, or grasp the nettle and get on with competing with men fair and square, if that is what we want to do.
It’s worth remembering that both options are a relatively new phenomenon, and consider the likelihood of your success in relation to history, biology and economics, before you choose.
There is another way, I think, which is to avoid anarchic playgrounds like twitter for a start, use your time in more useful and creative pursuits. And maybe don’t expect so much from men and so little from women.

polidori redux
polidori redux
2 years ago
Reply to  Claire D

I agree with you. There is that popular little quip that you probably know: “Don’t wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty but the pig enjoys it.” Why some men hurl abuse at women on (or off) line bemuses me. Not because I am more gallant than the average, but because I am genetically programmed to enjoy women’s company. Some men have a screw loose.
And, If a woman gets no pleasure from being on Twitter, which is where the loose-screwed lurk, why go there? It isn’t compulsory.
I have never held a twitter account but I still manage to communicate.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
2 years ago
Reply to  Claire D

I don’t use Twitter, but from stories like this one, it seems to be a platform where emotionally immature people go to humble brag, whine, or indulge their base cruelty. Also, women and men shouldn’t compete (see that big guy in the girl’s bathing suit for a perfect illustration of why not); better they cooperate, work together, and appreciate each other’s strengths. Crying “misogyny” when one’s childish plea for attention is ignored or mocked reminds me of the robbery scene in Blackadder the Third, when the father tells the drama queen daughter to “shut up, you pregnant junkie f*gh*g!”

Malvin Marombedza
Malvin Marombedza
2 years ago

I often wonder were people get this idea that every avenue of life must be a smooth ride without bumps whatsoever. There are nasty people online, nasty people in real life too. Its okay to be idealistic, but the world as is does not care about your idealism. Its only objective is to beat you up until it forces you onto your knees. By God it will, if you let it. Morally wrong? Absolutely. But there is nothing you can do about it. If Twitter trolls hound you constantly, get off it or suck it up. Don’t waste valuable editorial space moaning about it.

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
2 years ago

People tend to be nastier on the internet than in real life, especially toward strangers because they’re not at risk of taking a beating. If you don’t want something nasty said to you, don’t post… at all.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
2 years ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

Similarly, the person who gives you the finger behind the wheel of her car will apologize profusely if she bumps carts with you at the supermarket.

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
2 years ago

I’ve never really understood why people get so angry behind the wheel.

Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
2 years ago
Reply to  Drahcir Nevarc

She just explained it Drahcir – anonymity/remoteness (in a vehicle) trigger more extreme reactions.

Graham Stull
Graham Stull
2 years ago
Reply to  Ian Stewart

Well yes. But I also feel there’s something inherently stress-inducing about controlling a vehicle at speeds the human brain is not naturally designed to navigate.

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
2 years ago
Reply to  Ian Stewart

Hmmm, yes I suppose you’re right, seeing as there’s evidently a similar mechanism with social media. Thanks for having the good grace not to call me a total thickie.

polidori redux
polidori redux
2 years ago
Reply to  Drahcir Nevarc

You’ve reminded me of an old joke:
” I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming, like his passengers”
The link is a bit tenuous.

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
2 years ago
Reply to  polidori redux

Haha, good one!

Dawn McD
Dawn McD
2 years ago
Reply to  Drahcir Nevarc

I don’t understand it either, and I’m an angry driver . It really bothers me and I’m trying to work on it, for the sake of my own health and also to stay out of trouble. I don’t think it’s anonymity but lack of control. I’m not an angry pedestrian! I often detour off the arterial roads into residential neighborhoods, even though it will take me longer to get to my destination, just so I can drive down a few quiet streets without anyone in my way.
It seems to get worse the older I get, because the less time I have left to live the more sensitive I feel about having my time wasted. That’s my only theory; if I had the great Jordan Peterson in front of me, I’d ask him to explain why I’m an angry driver. One of the things I’ve always envied about the super rich is that they have other people to drive them around, while they occupy themselves with more worthwhile things.

jonathan carter-meggs
jonathan carter-meggs
2 years ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

This solution leaves the influence (unfortunately that is what social media has perversely) in the hands of hate filled morons.

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
2 years ago

Not necessarily, but if we’re all to be persistently moderated to protect sensitive people from hurt feels, I would rather they stayed off. The fact that journalists now trawl social media looking for “offence” stories to peddle as news is tedious. If you don’t want trolls commenting on your new baby or hair do don’t share it to the public!

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
2 years ago

“Jankowicz supplies a whole toolkit of ideas for protection … Be intersectional.”
You would have thought that of all people Kate Clanchy would by now have at least some grasp of the sheer undiluted vileness of woke.

Tom Watson
Tom Watson
2 years ago
Reply to  Drahcir Nevarc

Real intersectionality has never been tried!

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
2 years ago
Reply to  Tom Watson

Haha!

Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
2 years ago

Following a recent Unherd article by Kate Clanchy, I read her book. Entirely lefty in tone, and with typically left inconsistencies (streaming in schools a practical necessity, grammar schools bad) it nevertheless conveys an impression of a genuinely warm and intelligent person. Perhaps that’s why this article irritated me more than most.

Everybody foolish enough to be on Twitter is at risk from trolling. It is not a gendered issue, it is not misogynist, it’s just cowards venting their frustration anonymously and indiscriminately.

If there is any gender issue at all, it’s that social exclusion is the primary weapon of intra female violence. Women are certainly very well represented in the troll community.

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/news/a43626/women-half-online-trolls/

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/middle-aged-women-worst-online-trolls-demographic-i-can-understand-why-1104024

Last edited 2 years ago by Martin Bollis
Max Price
Max Price
2 years ago

I would be interested to see quantifiable data that shows how much more often women are abused online. I hear it asserted over and over how much worse it is for women. Perhaps men just deal with it better or don’t complain about it as much.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
2 years ago
Reply to  Max Price

It would also be interesting to see the data demonstrating which gender contributes most of the “abusive content” – and in what proportion it’s aimed at the same gender as the contributor.
Unfortunately, the absence of double-blind peer reviewed studies in these areas renders most of these articles largely uninformative.

Last edited 2 years ago by Ian Barton
Lindsay S
Lindsay S
2 years ago
Reply to  Ian Barton

The the way gender is being bandied about as being fluid, chances are the data wouldn’t be accurate anyway.

*waiting for approval? Is it because the word gender is now a trigger word?

Last edited 2 years ago by Lindsay S
Wilfred Davis
Wilfred Davis
2 years ago
Reply to  Max Price

I think this is probably correct, in that (on average) women can often be more easily upset, and can be more liable to take things personally.

For example – switching to comedy, as a relief from online abuse – it is usual for a man seeing a male character being made to look ridiculous, not to be hurt, but to laugh.

However, when a woman sees a ridiculous portrayal of a woman, she may get upset because the figure is being made fun of (i) for being a woman, and further this is perceived as (ii) a general attack on all women, and by extension (iii) a personal attack on that individual woman viewer.

I knew a highly intelligent woman who couldn’t bear Monty Python because of its disrespectful attitude to women. And there was me thinking it was mostly sending up pompous male figures of authority such as policemen, army officers, MPs, civil servants, bishops, judges, headmasters, and so on.

A vile, cowardly attack on all men? Or comedy?

Last edited 2 years ago by Wilfred Davis
Lindsay S
Lindsay S
2 years ago
Reply to  Wilfred Davis

I don’t think it’s so much that women don’t have a sense of humour and more that feminists don’t have a sense of humour which is why they make easy targets for trolls. Women frequently have low self esteem and so can be sensitive to personal attacks on their appearance and I while I’ve never personally received a death threat or rape threat, I can’t imagine seeing the funny side to that. However I would certainly argue that women can be just as vicious as men and men probably receive as much online abuse as women because I don’t think abuse is a gendered issue.
* again waiting for approval, it’s the word gender again, isn’t it? Last time I checked it wasn’t a swear word nor a vulgarity!

Last edited 2 years ago by Lindsay S
Wilfred Davis
Wilfred Davis
2 years ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

I don’t disagree with with what you say, but just to reiterate my specific point.

I think (some) women can (sometimes) react to an unflattering portrayal or criticism of another woman in specific ways:

  • One is to assume that the criticism is directed at that other woman because she is a woman (not, for example because she might merit criticism or is actually doing something deserving ridicule).
  • Second, that the motive for this is malicious (men are so nasty to women, etc, etc).
  • Third, that this magically translates into a personal attack on the woman observer (over and above the original subject).

(So the above wouldn’t apply to your example of a personal attack on that woman’s appearance, because it actually would be directed at her as an individual.)

Generally, I do not think that men tend to react in the way I have described above. In short, they are much less likely to take it personally or as a generalised attack on men.

Final note: I deliberately chose comedy in order to steer away from such matters as the threats which you describe.

I’m talking about comedy, and suddenly the narrative escalates to threats amounting to criminal offences carrying penalties up to life imprisonment. Which rather illustrates my point: taking things more seriously than is entirely warranted.

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
2 years ago
Reply to  Wilfred Davis

I got your point and just went on a little tangent of my own about women and social media. Unfortunately it’s the humourless man fearers/haters that tend to be the most vocal and the rest of us get tarred with the same brush. As a man I’m sure you understand what that’s like.
*why does this need approval? Surely not the word “women”?

Last edited 2 years ago by Lindsay S
Samir Iker
Samir Iker
2 years ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

Try “birthing persons”

Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
2 years ago
Reply to  Max Price

My thoughts too. I recall getting into online political debates when the internet first established and I was totally flamed by irrational extremists who dominated those echo chambers.

I learned my lesson and dropped out. It was nothing to do with being male, just the early evidence of how online anonymity encourages extremist views.

R Wright
R Wright
2 years ago

“Games designer Brianna Wu was driven from her home during an online campaign against sexism in her industry.”
Utterly incorrect. What a despicably false way to characterise that situation. I won’t bother reading the rest.

Helen E
Helen E
2 years ago
Reply to  R Wright

Brianna Wu, born John Walker Flynt, is not a woman.

Derek Smith
Derek Smith
2 years ago

‘ Games designer Brianna Wu was driven from her home during an online campaign against sexism in her industry.’

As Austin Powers would say, ‘that’s not a woman…’

Rick Lawrence
Rick Lawrence
2 years ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

Maybe I’m missing something but who and why are 11 people liking this inane post?

Derek Smith
Derek Smith
2 years ago
Reply to  Rick Lawrence

This article is supposed to be about abuse of women on the internet.

Go do your homework and come back with a useful reply.

Last edited 2 years ago by Derek Smith
Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
2 years ago

Personally I would like to see fewer articles about how something affects “women” when what is being complained about affects both sexes even if it is perceived to affect women more. If both men and women can be induced to feel they have a stake in a solution to whatever the problem is something might be done rather it just being regarded as some woman’s problem.
That said the potential solution to the problem outlined in this article touted by the government is one where I stand behind Kathleen Stock’s criticism set out in her article of yesterday on Unherd. My response to rubbish on twitter is to post here rather than twitter.

Tom Scott
Tom Scott
2 years ago

I’ve never used Twitter and never missed it.
Life is too short to waste it on such things.

Jon Hawksley
Jon Hawksley
2 years ago
Reply to  Tom Scott

Twitter is too short to say anything worth reading.

Last edited 2 years ago by Jon Hawksley
Madeleine Jones
Madeleine Jones
2 years ago

Twitter is what you make of it. You can have an anon account with a frog picture. Or you can have a more public facing account. After all, what you tweet and who you follow is your choice. That’s my rule on Twitter. I’m also reminded of Helen Dale’s Twitter feed, which is pretty wholesome with some minor political / historical remarks. She handles situations gracefully. My point is: it’s very possible to be a woman and enjoy Twitter for what it is.
I think much of the pain comes from putting on a ‘public relations’ mask on what is meant to be a casual, sort of silly environment.

Tom Scott
Tom Scott
2 years ago

What value is there in lots of frog pictures with comments from lots of unknown people?
Seems rather bizarre.

Bryan Dale
Bryan Dale
2 years ago

Inherently dangerous? You’re sitting at a computer safe in your home. People on Twitter can be nasty, but they can’t hurt you.

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
2 years ago
Reply to  Bryan Dale

I agree that much abuse that might perhaps be upsetting does not render you unsafe but threats of death or rape clearly come into a different category and should be reported and followed up by the police in all cases. News of a few posters of this sort being imprisoned might at least drastically reduce this sort of threat being circulated.

William Shaw
William Shaw
2 years ago

The solution to all of this is simple… stop using social media.
But the complainers and self-appointed victims don’t want to do they, because then they’d have nothing to write about.

jonathan carter-meggs
jonathan carter-meggs
2 years ago

Manners and politeness were a necessary invention to help manage public discourse. The rules were widely accepted and universally understood. Real face to face meetings meant that rude people were identified, shunned, or sanctioned. Twitter….no manners no politeness, annonymity all mean the very worst people can spit hatred with impunity. It seems all of this anger was just under the surface and once released it multiplies easily. What we have lost? What have we created? How much worse can it get, because we know it will.

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
2 years ago

We have vast swathes of people who struggle with being disagreed with and cannot debate for the life of them. I call them activists.

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
2 years ago

In case anyone missed it, Clanchy also did a wonderful interview with Freddie Sayers; an eye-opener. I hope to hear more and more from her.

Mike Wylde
Mike Wylde
2 years ago

If you ignore Twitter then it can’t harm you. A minority choose to interface with it and, generally, they all deserve what they get!

Tom Scott
Tom Scott
2 years ago

Does anyone acually NEED to use Tritter?
This is a genuine question, because all we ever read about are negative the results.