United Kingdom: Threatening rape on Twitter

“Aggressive stalkers” are hounding British women on Twitter, said theEvening Standard in an editorial. Caroline Criado-Perez was deluged with threats of rape and murder at a rate of one tweet a minute because she successfully campaigned to get a woman’s picture—Jane Austen’s, no less—on the new 10 pound banknote. When a member of Parliament, Stella Creasy, spoke out against the abuse, she was also targeted with threats of rape, with one user saying he would come to her house to rape her and another saying he would videotape the attack and post it on the Internet. “Plainly, the illusion of anonymity online gives lonely, inadequate, and angry individuals—the great majority of them men—the idea that they are free to be aggressive toward women without consequences.”

This goes far beyond ordinary trolling, said Owen Jones in The Independent. Many men like to point out that they, too, have to deal with insulting trolls, and they say women should just toughen up. But few men are terrorized like Criado-Perez was. Rape is a physical crime. Threatening it is not the same as tweeting, “You’re an idiot.” This type of onslaught is an attempt “to drive women from public life.” Twitter has a responsibility to shut down the accounts of these attackers.

It should do no such thing, said Mic Wright in The Daily Telegraph. Twitter has agreed to add a “report abuse” button—but even that could be misused. Any Twitter user with huge numbers of followers could “quite easily encourage their fans to click it to silence a critic they disliked.” And surely we don’t want Twitter to end anonymity? That would kill the social network’s much-praised contribution to civic movements, such as the Arab Spring revolutions. “Asking Twitter to moderate misogyny is a waste of time,” said Jane Fae in The Guardian. Like Facebook, Twitter is a U.S. company with a corporate culture that has internalized the U.S. understanding of free speech, “which can at times seem like the freedom of a privileged elite” to make obscene or offensive jokes. Instead, we can ask the police to enforce the law. Threatening someone with rape is a crime—it falls under harassment. So the button that should be installed on Twitter should send the report of abuse “directly to the local police force, a bit like a security alarm.”

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In the meantime, the Twitterverse can band together against the trolls, said Donald Clarke in The Irish Times(Ireland). Cambridge historian Mary Beard, who frequently appears on TV to entertain us with tales of the ancient Romans, has shown us the way. When she gets an offensive attack, she retweets it to all her followers “in the hope that the abuser’s friends and family will spot it and realize what a nasty little oik” he is. This week, after one troll called her a “filthy old slut,” one of her followers figured out who the troll was and threatened to tell his mother. The man, Oliver Eric Rawlings—“let’s repeat his name as often as possible, shall we?”—apologized immediately and deleted his account. It just goes to show that, on the Internet as in life, “bullies are really cowards.”