How to Be the Perfect Victim of Internet Harassment
Beginning in November 2016, I became the target of a campaign of anti-Semitic, misogynistic harassment, primarily on social media and by email. That harassment was the direct result of the work I do studying classical reception in virtual antifeminist and white supremacist communities.
I responded to this onslaught in several ways — I shared screenshots of some of the anti-Semitic memes with my friends on Facebook (which turned into an article about the ensuing conversation), I wrote an editorial on my online journal Eidolon, and I wrote an article about the gaslighting element of this kind of harassment on a feminist publication called The Establishment. Almost immediately, I began to get a great deal of criticism — some constructive, some less so — on my performance of victimhood. I say that as a joke, more or less, but it was also profoundly unfunny, because it’s actually quite painful to lose friendships and professional relationships because a bunch of guys with Pepe the Frog avatars decided that it would be fun to terrorize you.
When my more public responses energized my trolls even further, I began using a blocklist on Twitter and contacted a friend who works in internet security to help me assess the seriousness of the threats. I already had plans to speak at three colleges in March, so I also contacted those departments to arrange for security at my talks.
I came up with the title for this essay that March. From my perspective now, ten months later, I now know that by March the worst of the harassment was over — the threats of violence that I faced in January had ended, and harassment on Twitter and by email had slowed down significantly. However, I was also beginning to come to terms with the fact that, three months in, online harassment was still very much a part of not only my life in general, but my professional life in particular. At the 2017 annual SCS meeting, a former professor of mine commented that the death threats had made me a “rock star,” which felt like an accusation that I wasn’t sure how to parse. And the topic inevitably came up in the Q&As at lectures I gave. It was beginning to feel like my new normal.
It is in that context that I wrote the abstract for this essay and gave it a somewhat tongue-in-cheek title, because of course it is impossible be a truly perfect victim. Humor was a coping mechanism I needed, especially because there were parts of the experience that felt so surreal, because — and this is a theme I will return to periodically throughout this talk — it is very difficult to know how seriously to take online harassment, and how serious to be about it.
In December 2017, the Huffington Post released a leaked copy of the Daily Stormer’s style guidelines. (Lest you think I’m the only one inclined to use semi-ironic titles, check out the subtitle the editors gave to this piece!) The guide is a slightly horrifying mixture of the kind of material one might find on any online publication’s style guide (such as “strong ledes are very important”) and statements such as “There should be a conscious agenda to dehumanize the enemy, to the point where people are ready to laugh at their deaths. So it isn’t clear that we are doing this — as that would be a turnoff to most normal people — we rely on lulz.” The importance of lulz is laid out more fully in this passage:
This tactic is hardly a secret: in the site’s August 2016 manifesto “A Normie’s Guide to the Alt-Right” (archived here) — which was a more hardline response to the March 2016 Breitbart article “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” by Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari — Anglin wrote that one of the main contributions that troll culture made to the Alt-Right was their characteristic mode of “Non-ironic Nazism masquerading as ironic Nazism.” Sociologist Angela Nagle writes in her book Kill All Normies that this combination of irony and hyperbole is “typical of the online style that hides itself from interpretation through a postmodern tonal distance, so that if any normie were to interpret it literally they would be laughed at” (p. 26). To take Anglin at his word is to be mocked as someone who doesn’t get the joke — but he also suggests that he ought to be taken at his word, that he does really mean the intentionally outrageous things he says.
In that space, it is nearly impossible to tell whether anything is really meant “seriously.” This August, the Daily Stormer was effectively no-platformed on the mainstream internet when, in the immediate aftermath of the death of activist Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Anglin published a piece I won’t link to with the title “Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut,” in which he argued, “Despite feigned outrage by the media, most people are glad she is dead, as she is the definition of uselessness.” At a dinner party a few days later, a friend asked me if I thought that Anglin’s piece was “serious.” And I responded, almost without thinking, “What does it even mean to be serious on the internet anymore?”
It is in this fundamentally unstable environment of absurdity that I want to foreground this essay about how to support members of our community who have been harassed. And that is why I used a somewhat joking title, framing this talk, if you will, as a non-ironic discussion of internet harassment masquerading as an ironic discussion of harassment — even though I am aware that joking about harassment is problematic terrain that already positions me as an imperfect victim, because I’m choosing to deploy humor even though I know that those less privileged than I am may view harassment as an extremely unfunny issue.
Although many perceive online harassment by trolls to be an entirely distinct problem from the kind of harassment that occurs in a professional setting, my experience has been that being harassed online directly impacted my interactions with my colleagues. We need to address the permeability of that boundary. We need to reconceptualize online abuse as as professional struggle that many classicists will be confronted with and continue to discuss how to lessen the negative impact that it can have on collegial relationships. If we allow “incorrect” performances of victimhood to negatively affect relationships between scholars, then maybe we really are letting the trolls win.
As I mentioned, the harassment targeted at me has at this point mostly petered out. But it’s hard to feel too relieved about that — partly because I assume that it’s only a temporary furlough, partly because I’ve watched and sympathized as the trollstorms have moved on to other targets, partly because I’ve begun to receive invitations that I feel deeply ambivalent about to write and speak about harassment in venues like this one. But with some distance from my own experiences, and through talking with others about what they encountered, I’ve been able to take a step back and evaluate some of the harmful patterns I’ve witnessed in how our field customarily responds to this kind of abuse.
The first expectation people have of victims of harassment is that you can produce some kind of proof that your harassment is “serious” enough to warrant concern and sympathy — although, as I’ve argued, “seriousness” is a difficult concept to pin down in this context. If what you’re receiving is deemed mere “trolling” rather than serious harassment, then you risk being accused of whining and hysteria — especially, it hardly needs saying, if you are a woman.
It is also absolutely imperative that you “prove” that what you’re experiencing as harassment is not merely an overreaction to spirited academic discourse. The ability to differentiate trolling from energetic rebuttals of your arguments is a crucial element of perfect victimhood. It is also nearly impossible, because, as sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has argued, many trolls hide attacks that are deeply gendered and racialized in nature in the guise of attacks on your credibility and authority as an expert in the field. I used to think that I had brought those kinds of attacks on myself by venturing into public scholarship only a few years after receiving my PhD, but after witnessing recent attacks on Mary Beard I now feel confident in saying that there is no level of scholarly achievement that will protect you from being branded a fraud by trolls masquerading as good-faith critics.
As far as the media is concerned, the absolute trump card for proving that you are the victim of serious harassment is a death threat. But the disproportionate amount of attention and rhetorical weight given to death threats is actually warping the conversation about harassment in unhealthy and unproductive ways.
I received a few death threats, including one where the threatening individual knew my home address — or rather the address of the home that I’d moved out of two months earlier, although I still felt afraid. As part of my response to the threat, as I mentioned earlier, I contacted a friend who has worked in security to ask what kind of threats I should take seriously. The response I got was, essentially, that it was impossible for me as an individual to know; one of the largest indicators that a threat may be genuine is activity by the threatener across multiple platforms, and I simply don’t have the will or the bandwidth to monitor the social media presences of all of my trolls. In other words, something that looks like a death threat is very likely intended just to frighten, and the bigger dangers may lurk in less obviously scary messages. Hidden in an avalanche of identical anti-Semitic memes may be a genuine threat, and most death threats made on Twitter are intended only to frighten.
The obvious response to this, which many well-meaning colleagues suggested when I first began to write about the anti-Semitic abuse I was receiving, is simply to deactivate one’s Twitter account. I agree that deactivating one’s Twitter account can be a very healthy step. However, for those of us who engage in public scholarship, doing so cuts off one of the only avenues for self-promotion and connecting with one’s audience — the real audience of people who want to read and engage productively with your work, not just the audience of hate-reading trolls. Even more crucially, I know many independent scholars who don’t have departments and keep in touch with their colleagues primarily through social media.
In order to maintain that community but protect myself from trolls, I’ve started using a tool called a blocklist, which allows you to subscribe to other Twitter users and automatically block everybody who they are blocking. This has done wonders to clean up my mentions, but has also exposed me to a fair amount of critique, because for every person who advised me to delete my account, there was another who urged me to engage with my trolls.
Confronting these dueling, mutually exclusive expectations can feel somewhat like reading teaching evaluations where one student wants more lecturing and one wants more discussion. Regardless, the pressure to engage with one’s trolls can manifest not only as encouragement to do so, but as shame if you do not. This kind of philosophy is perhaps best exemplified by a passage in Mary Beard’s new book Women & Power (p. 38):
Ironically, the well-meaning solution often recommended when women are on the receiving end of this stuff turns out to bring about the very result the abusers want: namely, their silence. “Don’t call the abusers out. Don’t give them any attention; that’s what they want. Just keep mum and ‘block’ them” you’re told. It is an uncanny reprise of the old advice to women of “put up and shut up”, and it risks leaving the bullies in unchallenged occupation of the playground.
Beard is mostly correct, although it would be unreasonable to expect all of us to be, as Mary Beard was anointed a few years ago by the New Yorker, “troll slayers.” But it is undeniably the case that, although some prominent figures like Lindy West have successfully framed leaving Twitter as a triumph of sorts, most of the time it looks more like you’re slinking off to lick your wounds in private. (Witness, for example, the responses to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ decision to delete his Twitter account after a recent feud with Cornel West.) And it is certain that, if you leave, your trolls will celebrate.
Many of you are likely aware of the tragic phenomenon wherein individuals, often young children, kill themselves after being bullied. This phenomenon is sometimes called “bullycide.” Although that somewhat infelicitous term has not really achieved wide usage, it is in fact very commonly used, although with a slightly different meaning, by the Pepe the Frog set. Trolls talk sometimes about trying to troll people into killing themselves — on November 9, 2016, Andrew Anglin posted an article on the Daily Stormer that was little more than a long compilation of tweets by people about how afraid they were, followed by the observation “You can troll these people and definitely get some of them to kill themselves.” More often, however, to these people “bullyciding” means forcing somebody off the internet, or at least off Twitter.
(As a side note, there is a debate that I am sure most of the people here are aware of about the use — or perhaps overuse — of language of harm in left-wing circles. The question often asked is if language can truly be said to be violence, or to harm people. Regardless of what you yourself may think about this topic, please note that this linguistic slippage is, contrary to popular opinion, far from unique to the left. “Bullycide” is a prime example of how those boundaries are blurred on the right as well.)
In an ideal world, we would all follow Beard’s lead and work to ensure that the bullys’ voices do not drown out our own. In my experience, however, staying in that fight when there is such overwhelming pressure to withdraw from it requires the support and kindness of our academic community. As the number of classicists who experience online harassment grows exponentially, it becomes ever more crucial that we stop policing how victims of harassment behave and instead work as a community to prevent them from being isolated and silenced.
Donna Zuckerberg is the Editor-in-Chief of the online Classics publication Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton, and her writing has appeared in the TLS, Jezebel, The Establishment, and Avidly. Her book Not All Dead White Men, a study of the reception of Classics in Red Pill communities, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in Fall 2018.
