I’m with you 100% on calling out obnoxiousness and harassment online. I am a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders and have been embarrassed by some of the statements online by Sanders supporters. But respectfully, Parker think you fail to make the case in this article that the BernieBros phenomena is unique to Sanders or is somehow the candidate or campaigns fault or responsibility. The fact that the one truly egregious tweet you have is from a woman is not trivial in a story with the headline “BernieBros are real”. I wish you had more illustrations other that one really gross one from a woman and tweets like “@ParkerMolloy why do you hate bernie so much?” from an Australian guy who lives in France which while annoying aren’t really all that odd for the cesspool Twitter can be. I’nm not saying you don’t have lots of other evidence but we can’t see from the article. If you have been harassed a bunch I am sorry for that, I do see that as a problem.

More broadly, I’m not saying Twitter harrassment or even rudeness is not a problem. I have seen it go both ways. I’ve seen vile anti-semetic tweets (even memes) against Sanders. And I’ve seen disgusting sexist slut-shaming comments (since she once did some nude-modelling) towards the model Emily Ratajkowski for supporting Sanders. I’m not even saying there hasn’t been more of that from Sanders supporting trolls — it’s believable Sanders has passionate young supporters and some of them may be sexist trolls. But in your piece and in some of the mainstream media coverage as Greenwald and my own ad hoc investigations have discovered a number of the “BernieBros” are either women or Republicans bashing HRC for their own trolly reasons. This doesn’t excuse it of course. And I”m not saying there aren’t male sexist Sanders supporters I’m just surprised by the thinness of some of these stories.

I think internet harassment is a big issue. The anonymity of the internet added to pervasive sexism and misogyny and meanness deserves to be addressed. But this seems to be wielded against Sanders who has strongly condemned this behavior as has other campaign leadership. I feel it is a real issue being used by the Clinton campaign (eg Bill speaking out about it) to create doubt about the candidate. I think (as Greenwald also argues) this exploits a real issue. I don’t think we blame a sports figure or a pop idol when his idiot fans do something awful. We blame the fans. But the Clinton campaign is exploiting this. I think that’s sad.