Greta Thunberg’s Online Attackers Reveal a Grim Pattern | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/greta-thunberg-online-harassment
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is 17 years old, legally a minor. Despite her age, in the past week, numerous actual adults have made her the subject of many forms of online harassment. Some say she ought to be “burnt at the stake”; others have circulated images of a sex doll that resembles Thunberg and purportedly “speaks” using recordings of her voice; still others created and distributed a cartoon that appears to depict the activist being sexually assaulted.
The internet didn’t create this problem, but it does amplify it. The same forces that have allowed Thunberg and her message to climb to global virality are, in the hands of those who wish to discredit the teenager, the best weapon to use against her. While these smears are especially troubling in Thunberg’s case because of her age, they mirror the kinds of targeted online harassment employed against many people and groups by those who wish to silence them. The behavior is shocking, but not a shock.
To begin with, Thunberg is a woman on the internet. While there is debate about whether men or women experience more harassment online, studies have shown the harassment women experience tends to be more personal, more gendered, more sexual, and more likely to be intense enough to drive them off of the social media platform where they’re being harassed. “The saddest thing that has emerged from my research is that young women aged 18 to 30 have accepted harassment as part and parcel of being online,” says Jessica Vitak, who studies online privacy and security at the University of Maryland. “They have various ways of dealing with it, but they don’t include thinking, ‘This shouldn’t be happening, and I should be fighting to make it stop.’” Harassment of women online has become a norm.
The harassment is only heightened when the woman in question is, like Thunberg, a public figure. The Inter-Parliamentary Union, a global organization including the parliaments of 179 member countries, found that more than 80 percent of female parliamentarians had experienced psychological violence, the most common form being online harassment. According to Mona Lena Krook, who studies women in politics at Rutgers University, women activists like Thunberg have very similar experiences, and often in the exact form that Thunberg has been experiencing this week. “The first place people go are gender-based slurs or sexualizing tactics,” Krook says. “Photoshopped sexual images are really common. When you sexually objectify somebody, your perception of their competence and humanity changes. It’s about delegitimizing them to a broader audience.” Politicians and activists from Hillary Clinton to US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Malala Yousafzai are frequently pornified by their critics.
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