Happy Friday, rulers! Thanks for your responses to last week's question. If you didn't get a chance to respond last week, I'd still love to hear: Would you like to get this newsletter in your inboxes earlier than noon when it goes out on Fridays? Thank you to Maya Parthasarathy for your help putting this newsletter together. Nina Jankowicz didn't start out studying gendered abuse online. She started out studying and writing about Russian disinformation (the subject of book she wrote in 2020), which led her to research the Kremlin's use of gendered attacks against women in the democratic opposition in former Soviet countries. Then, during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, she started taking a closer look at the abuse and vitriol women get online in the English-speaking world, particularly women politicians. The topic, as it often does for most women with an online presence, hit home — and the idea for a second book was born. That book,How to Be a Woman Online , was published this week. It uses a combination of academic research, interviews and Jankowicz's own experience to outline a step-by-step plan for handling an inevitable part of being a woman, particularly a woman with another marginalized identity, online: harassment and abuse. I called Jankowicz to discuss what she learned writing the book and what she thinks of the debate that is currently swallowing my timeline about a TikTok expose and doxing. Katelyn Fossett: How did the book come about? Nina Jankowicz: I thought, you know, there have been plenty of excellent books written that describe the problem of online abuse and how horrific it is, but very little, I think, that leaves women feeling empowered and stronger about making their voices heard. ... And having gone through abuse myself, I thought I could kind of couple the abuse that I have experienced with the research and lead women through the strategies that I wish I had known the first time I got abuse. I would not have had to go through this soul-searching process about whether I wanted to continue to engage. Fossett: I want to ask about what happened in the past week with Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz. She published an article about an influential conservative TikTok account that ignited this big debate about harassment, doxing and online privacy. She has a lot of people who have risen up on Twitter together to attack her and other journalists who are tweeting in support of her. What do you know about those kinds of campaigns, which seem coordinated? Jankowicz: With Taylor, what seems to happen is she's become kind of the demon of the far right. Any time she does anything — literally all she has to do is send one tweet — it might set the far right off. In particular, it seems like Tucker Carlson has it out for her. And when he features her on his show, people tend to come after her. She's talked about that publicly, and there have been research studies on that ... harassment against the people who are featured on that show or similar shows. And so, you know, I think it is a really difficult thing to police because it's obviously cross-platform. If we were on the street and that was happening, then law enforcement would intervene. She would be able to get a restraining order. But because this is happening on the internet, there's very little that anyone wants to do about it. And the platforms aren't doing their due diligence in protecting people based on the terms of service they have. This is clearly coordinated harassment; not in the sense of a Twitter account saying, "Go attack Taylor Lorenz." It's just a diatribe that's happening on television that's then sending people toward her. I actually did a Reddit AMA earlier this week, which could have been a lot worse, but I did get a lot of men who doubt the problem even exists, or say that women deserve it because of the disrespectful way that they engage with men online, especially those who are older or less attractive than them, which I just think is ridiculous. Some guy said [women] are getting what they "dutifully earned." And I was just shocked about that. And I think that's what a whole lot of people who engage in harassment and these large influencers, whether they're on television or on social media platforms, that's how they think of it, too. It's kind of an eye-for-an-eye situation. But it sounds very scary to me, like the arguments that are used to justify rape. You know, the she-was-asking-for-it sort of thing. Fossett: What surprised you while working on the book? Jankowicz: A couple of things come to mind. One … all the women I interviewed are quite prominent in their fields. Some of them are journalists, some of them are playwrights, some of them are activists. And they all have different ways of coping with things. I think in general, the consensus is to amplify the trolls. And one thing that has helped me is kind of taking that advice and using screenshots that I remove people's identifying information from to raise awareness about how constant this phenomenon is for women when we're engaging not just on social media, but when we go on mainstream media as well. I like to do that. I also feel like it kind of gives me agency to respond to these people without perpetuating a cycle of abuse. I learned that from these brilliant women that I spoke with. And then looking at how younger women and girls are affected by online abuse, both in the focus groups that I ran, as well as a study from an organization called Plan International. And they found that girls stop engaging at school, sometimes stop going to school, stop pursuing certain careers and stop speaking out online because of the online abuse that they receive or that they fear they're going to receive. And that totally tracks with what the young women that I spoke with said to me. They're all incredibly savvy about their online presences. But even knowing all of that, they're still afraid to make their voices heard because they've seen what happens to girls in their classes and girls in the world who do that. One young woman even said to me, "I don't want a lifestyle that public," and so their social media profiles are just extremely curated. They are friends-only, they are locked down. And that makes me really sad because it means that we're losing their voices. And I think when it comes time for some of these women to enter into public-facing roles, it's going to be really uncomfortable for them. And unfortunately, you know, some of them might just not want to enter to begin with. And that is super worrisome for me. Fossett: If you are experiencing harassment online, how much should you engage? Or should you engage? Jankowicz: My personal thing is I will give somebody one reply. And if it's clear that they're not engaging in good faith after I've sent them a respectful reply, that's when I make a decision about muting, blocking or reporting. I would just remind everybody that your timeline is not a democracy. It's a queendom, right? You can decide what you want to see there. MARK YOUR CALENDARS — Women and Tech: Seizing the Next Revolution: The world is living through a new era in tech marked by innovations in AI, 5G and blockchain. Join Women Rule on Friday 4/29 at 1 p.m. ET for back-to-back conversations on how to ensure women get the access and opportunities they need to shape the next tech revolution. FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, Anu Duggal, co-founder, Female Founders Fund, and Elaine Chao, former US secretary of labor and former secretary of transportation will be among the panelists. Register here for a chance to join us in-person or to tune in live: https://womerule429.splashthat.com/newsletter
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