IMPACT
A landmark 2014 Pew Research Center study shows that only five percent of people who are harassed online report the problem to law enforcement. Many more – a combined 31 percent – withdraw, either by changing their username, deleting their account, bowing out of an online forum, or simply not attending certain offline events. When people stop talking because they’ re afraid, that’ s evidence of a chilling effect.
But for a lot of people, including journalists, quitting social media simply isn’ t an option – and the Pew data reflects that. Forty-seven percent of those who are harassed online stood their ground and confronted their tormenter online. Fortyfour percent blocked the person responsible, and 22 percent reported the person to the website or online service hosting the exchange.
Half of the journalists we interviewed decided not to report the harassing tweets, some because they believed people should have a right to say whatever they want, and others because they weren’ t confident Twitter would do anything to address the issue. Across the board, the criticisms of Twitter were consistent: The company doesn’ t do enough to enforce its terms of service.
Jonathan Weisman told us,“ I think suspending or deleting [ attacker’ s ] accounts is pointless, because they just come back on under a different name. Twitter has to decide if they are going to stand by their terms of service or not. If they decide tomorrow,“ Look, we don’ t have the capacity to monitor all of this, and we want it to be a free exchange of ideas,” – then fine, we would know what it was. But they want to have it both ways – the halo of having terms of service, but not enforcing them. Or enforcing them only sporadically.”
Some of the journalists, including Weisman, stepped away from Twitter, at least for a while, while others stuck with the platform, hoping for a respite even as they braced for more abuse.
While this particular report did not test whether there was a chilling effect on journalists, it does show that targeted anti-Semitic on Twitter undoubtedly raised the cost of entry into( and staying in) the marketplace of ideas for journalists, particularly Jewish journalists.
White Supremacists Encourage Online Harassment of Jewish Journalists
While much of the online harassment of journalists is at the hands of anonymous trolls, there are known individuals and websites in the white supremacist world that have played a role in encouraging these attacks. These people and websites represent a sampling of the people and sites engaged in this activity, and have been on ADL’ s radar for some time.
Two of the neo-Nazis responsible for some of the attacks on Jewish journalists are Andrew Anglin, founder of the extremely popular white supremacist website The Daily Stormer and Lee Rogers of Infostormer( formerly The Daily Slave). While both Anglin and Rogers are banned from Twitter, they have encouraged their followers to Tweet anti-Semitic language and memes at Jewish journalists, including Julia Ioffe and Jonathan Weisman.
Ioffe wrote a profile of Donald Trump’ s wife, Melania, for the May 2016 issue of GQ. Anglin and Rogers( self-identified Trump supporters) felt the piece was unflattering. Anglin wrote to his supporters on April 28,“ Please go ahead and send her a tweet and let her know what you think of her dirty kike trickery. Make sure to identify her as a Jew working against White interests, or send her the picture with the Jude star from the top of the article.” Anglin provided Ioffe’ s Twitter address and the anti-Semitic picture he mentioned. Rogers followed a similar path a few days later, telling his supporters,“ I would encourage a continued trolling effort against this evil Jewish bitch.” He then provided Ioffe’ s Twitter address.
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