When Misogynist Trolls Make Journalism Miserable for Women

theatlantic.com

19 points·mwetzler··5 comments

I have a hypothesis. This phenomenon is similar to spam, i.e. an overwhelming amount of traffic from a busy minority. If that's the case, the solution may be the same: blacklists. I've attempted to implement a primitive Spamhaus for social media, to test this hypothesis, but it's not something that can be done in one's free time.

That would be well worth testing, so I hope you or someone else does find time.

I wonder if public shaming is a viable option here. Get e-mail threatening rape? Publish said e-mail. Something tells me that a lot of these morons aren't taking great care to anonymize their threats.

I'm not against that, but it only treats one symptom of misogyny, not the disease. Granted, it's one symptom that has many consequences of its own, so maybe it's ok.

I also wonder, given how widespread the phenomenon appears to be, whether shaming individual trolls will have any non-trivial impact on the total volume. Snowflakes in an avalanche, and all that.

That's not an answer. It's a human reaction, but there is no vetting or 'due process'. For example, what about people who impersonate/hijack email addresses, etc? Those people get caught in the maelstrom while totally innocent.

It's a mob reaction. I don't know what the answer is, but that's not it.

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