Online abuse is common ? and can be violent. Our panel members debate how to tackle the problem Helen Lewis-Hasteley : 'If you receive a threat, report it to the police' Last week, I asked a group of female bloggers to tell me about their experiences of sexism online. What they told me was eye-opening enough, but the response was incredible. As I had thought, many people were unaware of how widespread and targeted the abuse was ? and how extreme the obscenity. Afterwards, I received several emails from other writers who had also been threatened with death or rape, often in very graphic, detailed terms. Now, I believe in freedom of speech, but ? and several existing laws are clear on this ? you absolutely don't have the right to threaten violence against people with whom you disagree. So the first thing is to speak up. People might say that you're exaggerating, that you "can't handle bad language", that "everyone gets a bit of abuse on the internet", but the more evidence we collect, the harder that will be to maintain. If you receive a specific threat, report it to the police. If they don't take any notice, blog or tweet about it. Aside from the rape and death threats, which are flat-out illegal, there's a broader question: what do you have the "right" to say online? I believe that you are perfectly entitled to think I'm shrill, or ugly, or whatever ? but why should others pay for you to promote that opinion? That is what advertisers and other users effectively do if your comment is hosted on a commercial website. We need to have a conversation about how much we want to tolerate those who post disruptive, abusive, ad hominem attacks in comment threads and on social networking sites. It's clear to me that there is a problem with how many people view free speech online. If you turn up to a theatre and shout angrily about the actresses all the way through, you wouldn't be surprised if the rest of the audience was less than eager to have a drink with you at the interval, or if the management took a dim view. So why should a website trying to build a community be obliged to let you in if you do the same online? ? Helen Lewis-Hasteley is an assistant editor and writer for the New Statesman magazine Zoe Williams : 'Immediately you engage, the worst of it slips away' It wasn't the internet, as Laurie Penny has pointed out, that invented the weird rule whereby women have to be attractive before they're allowed to have an opinion. It is, however, as Penny and others have pointed out in the past week, specific to the internet age that "trolls" roam around, hunting out women with a point of view, better still if it's on a "women's" issue ? abortion, families, feminism ? in order to threaten her with sexual violence and/or call her an idiot. I've been giving out my opinions since the days when a reader who hated you had to put an actual pen to an actual piece of paper; I've had plenty of people saying I'm wrong, but it would have been unusual in the 90s for anyone to wish, out loud and with all their hearts, that you had cancer. And by "unusual", I mean, "it never happened". My perspective is a little different from that of women with blogs, because Comment is free is moderated; even though comments appear before they're removed (it's not pre-moderated), I am rarely fast enough on the draw to see them. A colleague wrote something about how she was on a diet, and someone on her thread said: "I've got a good way for you to lose weight, I could cut your limbs off one by one and make you eat them." I've never seen anything as bad as that, though I've seen plenty of "This comment was removed by a moderator", so it would rash to assume that they'd never occurred. What I have had instead is a lot of misogyny at half-mast ? no threats of sexual violence, just a persistent, sneering surprise that someone like me should be allowed to have an opinion. Who am I to say anything about social policy, or culture, or prisons, or books, or families and so on ? Am I an economist? Am I a prison governor? Am I a teacher? No? Well then. "You seem like a nice enough person," a typical comment might run, "but you don't know anything about this, or any other subject, and you should go back to writing about babies." This enraged me much more than the stuff that was moderated, because at least a person who is threatening to feed you your own thighs requires no reasoned response. Often, with the more subtle derision, you'd need strip it right back to first principles: explain the point of comment journalism; explain why your opinion isn't necessarily invalidated by your sexual apparatus. Below the line, the rules of the playground don't apply; if you ignore the abuse, it doesn't go away, it gets more and more florid. So even though it felt like a poor use of my time to spend the evening bare-knuckle fighting with nitwits, it is better than just letting it bloom and pretending not to mind. Immediately you engage, the worst of it simply slips away. As much as I hate to generalise about them, I think trolls dislike dealing with a human being; they like a pi?ata , some big ugly spectre that they can beat with the stick. If a pi?ata starts talking back, it might not increase your affection for it, but it makes you feel squeamish about hitting it in the face. There are still plenty of people commenting under my pieces who find me absolutely enraging, in everything I say, and it still perplexes me a little that they hover about waiting for my views, just so they can point out how idiotic they are (really, why put yourself through it? It's like eating pork when you know it gives you diarrhoea). But the cohort has refined itself to people who hate me specifically, rather than just hating me as an ensign of my sex, and I find them much easier to deal with and, paradoxically, more likeable. ? Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist Bella Mackie : 'We must join together as a community' Sexism on the internet is a common problem, and one that every comment site will have to tackle at some moments. The recent discussions about the abuse aimed at women bloggers have been brilliant at showing just how widespread the problem is, and hopefully this kind of dialogue will go some way towards eradicating it. On Comment is free, we have had a comprehensive talk policy for many years that commenters have to stick to in order to participate on the site. This policy is enforced by a team of moderators who work closely with editors in looking after threads that might be vulnerable to the kind of abuse mentioned by people like Laurie Penny and Helen Lewis-Hasteley. While disagreement is a valid part of any debate, we don't allow it to become simple aggression. The moderators on our site have become increasingly aware over the years of how many different layers of abuse can be used against female writers. The Comment is free team constantly re-evaluates our approach to this type of negativity, and we have found new approaches to improving our discussions and making our site more welcoming to women. The threats of rape or physical attack are at the very worst end of the scale and would never be tolerated on our website, but we can be tougher on the milder forms of misogyny seen on the web. I know that the best way to combat hate speech is to join together as an online community. Comment is free has become a much better place to debate recently, and this has a lot to do with our readers refusing to allow trolls of any sort to disrupt the quality of the threads for long. This has allowed female writers such as Sarah Ditum to host discussions below the line successfully, and regular columnists such as Deborah Orr to develop a relationship with readers online. Moderation and involved editors are incredibly important, but it's also vital to have a community of readers who report hate speech the moment they see it. Several bloggers have bravely spoken out about the problems for women online, now it takes the silent majority to actively show that it won't be tolerated. Our community will be at the forefront of this new course of action. ? Bella Mackie is Comment is free's community co-o
rdinator Catherine Redfern : 'What if we had a log of abusive comments?' A couple of weeks ago, I left my office to head home after a long day at work and was repeatedly verbally abused by two guys in a car stuck in traffic. Shaking, I weighed up my anger with the risk of being physically attacked and decided to trust my gut. I turned around, took a photo of the car on my phone, and then walked up to the open window and told them politely and calmly to stop it. They fell silent, ashamed and shocked. I walked away with my head held high, but I was shaking for half an hour afterwards. What made me feel so much better was being able to share my experience (and post the picture of the car) on Twitter. As soon I as explained what happened I received 30 to 40 messages of support, empathy, praise and even thanks, which almost brought me to tears. We can't always react like this; it's not always safe. But when we can, this " Hollaback " style of protest ? named after the famous anti-street harassment campaign, started in New York, which uses the web to name and shame harassers ? is powerful as a) it shows up so clearly that the personal is political and b) it makes us feel supported. When The F Word asked women to share their stories of street harassment a while ago we were inundated and awareness was raised of the problem. Could this approach work online? What if we had a central log of abusive comments that we could contribute to, perhaps anonymously, naming and shaming those responsible? Would grouping them all together simultaneously make people understand the extent of the problem and help us, as bloggers cope with this problem? Or would it end up being counterproductive, encouraging trolls to try to get published there? Would I want to read such a collection of abuse anyway, or want my abuser to know I'd read his comment? Perhaps, then, the focus of such a site should be to support and encourage each other to carry on, rather than retaliation. ? Catherine Redfern is founder of The F Word and co-author of Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement Internet Blogging Gender Feminism Women Crime Digital media Helen Lewis-Hasteley Zoe Williams Catherine Redfern Bella Mackie guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds