Online harassment is a barrier to democracy

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To wrap up my four-part series of interviews with women authors, I spoke to Alia Dastagir, a journalist whose book To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person compelled me to finish it in one sitting. This is a book about being a woman on the internet and the abuse and harassment we too frequently endure. I was interviewed for it, and even just talking about my own experiences was cathartic—but nothing prepared me for how Alia’s work transformed my understanding of what online harassment is and what it does to us.

Alia is careful not to box online harassment into one definition, instead exploring the range of negative experiences and consequences that emerge from being in online communities. That can include being threatened, being attacked for your identity, and being harmed in overt and subtle ways.

The book and our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, encompass many of the themes from my previous dispatches in this series. In case you missed them, check out the interviews about sexual violence investigations in the Title IX system, the ways abusers and the state collaborate through abortion legislation, and how beauty standards have warped alongside rising authoritarianism. And now, onto my interview with Alia.

Kat Tenbarge: What was your experience with online harassment that led you to write this book?

Alia Dastagir: For me, the harassment really ramped up in 2016, right around the first Trump election. Data shows that there was a huge uptick, especially for women journalists. I was spending a lot of time covering feminism under that first Trump presidency. I would get abuse that was textured in a certain way, that had a certain kind of vocabulary that, to me, signaled it was coming from the manosphere. Like, these are anti-feminist men. Obviously Black digital feminists, feminist bloggers had been experiencing this, writing about this, lobbying the platforms before I got my first abusive message.

I focused on women for a couple of reasons. One iteration of the book wasn't just focused on women, it was focused on all marginalized people online. Because this isn't just an issue that affects women, right? This is an issue that affects people of color, trans people, other LGBTQ folks, immigrants, and people living with disabilities. This is an issue that affects anybody who is trying to embark on fearless speech or come into these spaces to self-define and who are coming up against norms of behavior and how those things are litigated. But ultimately it ended up being a project about women, because I do think that there's something very specific about the experience of being a woman harassed online. I wanted this project to slow down and go very deeply into the body and the mind. I knew that my experience needed to be a part of that narrative. And this is an experience I could speak to. This is an experience that I had. I understood this intimately.

KT: When I'm speaking to victims of online harassment, there's often this gray area, not in the sense of whether they were harmed, but in the sense of what caused them the most harm and what sticks with them the most. Time and time again, people will say, “It's so silly to care about this,” or they'll try to sort of be self-deprecating in the way that they talk about the role of online harassment.

AD: There's this feeling of exhaustion and inevitability and that we just kind of have to accept all this. Like, “I need to just deal with it, because it's the internet,” and “What other choice do I have if I'm going to operate in these spaces?” I think that you can still say that and also be able to tell yourself that all of the responses you're having are legitimate, valid, and human. This is the thing that's so absurd about this notion of ignoring it. Sometimes when people say to ignore it, they mean “Don't react,” and sometimes, when people say to ignore it, they mean, “Don't feel.” That’s the part I think is really absurd, because we're not built to not feel. Information is meant to keep us alive at the most fundamental level. So we're not built to ignore language, nor should we ignore it.

There are women who have become desensitized, and there are ways that we sort of accommodate these experiences, but I don't think that it's true, and I don't think that you should aspire for it to be true, that your body and your brain are ever ignoring this information. Your body is doing some sort of evaluation of whether or not it's a threat to your life. Then you're making meaning out of it and then you're deciding what to do with it. Maybe you decide to report it or make a joke about it or compartmentalize it or externalize it with somebody in your life, but you're doing something with it that is labor. That whole step could be almost instantaneous for some women who have a lot of experience with this. But it's still labor, time, something that your body and your brain has to engage with. I really want people to be able to say, to be able to recognize, that they're not ignoring it, nor should they have to.

KT: There is so much value in how you examine the issue of online harassment through a biological lens. With online harassment and other forms of violence, so much of the broad societal and individual response is to shift blame onto the victim’s perception, rather than the perpetrator’s actions. It reminds me of that famous Tyler the Creator meme.

It sounds silly but I see people use this meme to invalidate victims of online harassment and create the broader sentiment that it’s not real and that it’s the victim’s fault for caring, so that we don’t have to acknowledge or deal with the consequences. Something you wrote that blew my mind is that our brains actually haven’t evolved to be able to distinguish between offline and online threats.

AD: There's some research in the book from Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, who worked with PEN America on some of their resources for women who experienced online harassment. And she has this quote from her book: “When people talk about the power of words, it’s not a metaphor.” Not only do words hold all these social and political meanings and histories, but the parts of our brain that process language are the same parts of our brain adjusting glucose and managing our immune systems and managing your heart rate. Verbal abuse is absolutely a physical experience. You can think about it in your own life, when people have said things to you. Maybe they’re not even abusive, maybe it's just insulting, something that makes you feel badly. You have a physical reaction to that. When I'm running on the street and somebody catcalls me, like street harassment, I feel that all over my body. If I'm in a meeting and someone sort of implies that something I said was stupid, uses language to dismiss me, I feel that. I've been in a bar and somebody says something disgusting to me, I feel that. I feel that in my stomach, I feel that in my throat. I sweat. My heart starts to beat faster. It’s really fundamentally kind of ridiculous, suggesting that language itself can be ignored or that it doesn't have a physical impact on a body.

Beyond that, you're talking about experiences that in many cases are very threatening. Sometimes it is a subtle sexist message that you have to sit with and reckon with. But many times these are explicit threats, and your body is meant to react to that. Your body's number one job is to keep you alive. I spoke to a neuroscientist and a woman who studies aggression online, and both of them said the human operating system has not adapted to this. There's research on how these things are sort of rewiring our brains. But you have a threat response system and it doesn't always know. You can't always intellectualize around these experiences. When I was mobbed, I really believed that my body thought I was going to die. I remember being in my room with the curtains drawn. I remember this thought, because I couldn't believe it. I was like, “Could I die from this? Die from being so scared?”

I think that is such a huge, important thing to stress, to people who are dismissive of the experiences, but also to the people who are having the experiences. Your reactions to this, the thoughts that you have, the emotions that you have, the physical reactions that you have, that you might want to suppress—this is your body doing exactly what it was designed to do. We tend to think about this problem in terms of women's responses, right? If you could just stop being so upset about it or sensitive or overwrought or scared, it would be okay, like it's really your responses that are the problem. That is crazy. The attention is so often paid to women's responses, the attention is then shifted from the sources of violence. How can we ever attend to this if the problem is women's hurt feelings or women's fears? That's not the problem. It’s so important to recognize that these experiences are not just hurtful, they are harmful. That is an important distinction to make. When you talk to women, not every woman is hurt by these experiences, not every woman is afraid. It is still a problem worth addressing, because you do not need to be consciously hurt or offended by something in order for it to cause individual or collective damage. Learning not to care about the damage isn't the same thing as not being damaged.

KT: It reminds me a little bit of the conventional wisdom around heat stroke, which is that by the time you're feeling thirsty, you’re already dehydrated. So by the time you are palpably feeling the consequences of this harm, it means harm has already been done.

AD: Some women said to me that they were really not deeply affected by experiences of online abuse. I don't want to discount that. I think that is probably true for some women, for a variety of reasons. At the same time, it's also very difficult in a day-to-day way to evaluate how you're doing. The zone is being flooded every single day. Every moment feels like an act of survival. But if you had a sort of unbiased third party asking you questions about how you are doing, they might reach different conclusions. There are studies of online harassment that say things like it leads to greater anxiety and depression and sometimes suicidality. Those are enormous impacts. At the same time, what about other things like disillusionment, cynicism, and that sort of slow march towards despair? How do you quantify that? That can really lead to the slow annihilation of the self. It’s much harder to notice and much harder to define.

KT: The depth and empathy you brought to this subject really unlocked my own perspective in a way I had not been able to before. As women journalists, I think we’ve been socialized to prove our worth by showing how tough we are in these kinds of situations. Reading this book, I saw things I said about my own ability to withstand online harassment in the past in a different light.

AD: When it's communicated to you in ways both explicit and implicit that in order to operate in these spaces you have to ignore this and be incredibly emotionally tough, of course, you internalize that. And some of that is true, right? You’re going to need to develop some skills to be able to operate in these spaces. But it becomes troubling when you start to conflate your ability to withstand these things with your value. When I started this reporting for the book, I would talk a lot about my experience with the online mob that was kind of launched by QAnon and encouraged by Donald Trump Jr. I thought it was like a branch that I was extending. But in hindsight, I think it was a way of saying I have value in these spaces, because I had this experience. That was important for me, to recognize that.

KT: There’s a source who I’ve interviewed a few times over the past two years. She’s an everyday single mom who has endured an enormous amount of online harassment, because her abusive ex-husband put videos of her reacting to his abuse online and they went so viral that it changed the entire fabric of her existence. We spoke a couple months ago and she told me she’s doing really well, but she described compartmentalizing and desensitizing herself to the abuse so she could be present for her kids. She literally said she had to “box it up and shove it in a closet.” At the time, I looked at this through the lens of women being forced out of public participation, and that’s definitely a component. But after reading your book, I also see there’s a component to compartmentalization and desensitization that can actually endanger you, because you’ve trained your body to ignore and minimize signs of danger.

AD: There is science around some of these coping strategies being more healthy than others. But it was very important to me to not be prescriptive and also to not be like “If you do this, you'll feel better,” because we all have very different lived experiences. We all have different histories. We all have different goals. The goal of fighting the oppressor and the goal of surviving the day are different strategies. And I'm not in a position to tell you what you should be doing in this moment. On compartmentalization and desensitization, they might not be the “healthiest” strategies in certain contexts, but they're what women are doing, and they're working in certain ways. Desensitization is not a coping mechanism, but it's something worth attending to, because when you talk to people who are very online, you hear this. You're like, “How do you cope? How do you deal with it?” They’re like, “I'm desensitized.” What came through in the reporting was that there's no question that if you become desensitized to somebody calling you a slur online, in some ways that is going to be good for you, because you are not going to be as dissuaded from what you're doing if you don't have as big of a physical reaction or emotional reaction to that. But just because you're desensitized to your abuse doesn't mean that you aren't experiencing other forms of distress. The literature on living in violent communities shows people can absolutely become desensitized to violence, but that doesn't mean that they're also not more anxious or depressed or experiencing those other forms of disillusionment, that subtle sort of loss of identity.

Desensitization on its own is a neutral term. It's neither good nor bad. It's something that sometimes a therapist will strive for with a patient. If you're so afraid to get in the car after an accident that you can't go anywhere, desensitization to something like that could be a good thing. But you don't want to become desensitized to danger. We don't want to become desensitized to things that really are bad and threatening and violent. So many of the women that I interviewed were like, “My threat response system is just so much less effective now, because I have trained myself not to react to certain things.” On compartmentalization, it’s essential for any human being. You have to compartmentalize things all the time. If you get in a fight with your friend or your partner and you have to go to work, you’ve got to put it away, right? Something difficult happens and you need to go to your kid’s recital, you need to show up for your child. Compartmentalization works in so many contexts. The issue becomes when you put it away and you never come back to it. It's not like you have to have 50 therapy sessions, but you have to return to it in some way, to be able to have a conversation with yourself. “Why does this thing bother me so much? What did I need in that moment that I wasn't getting? How do I give it to myself?” If you compartmentalize everything forever and you never attend to it, it is going to be corrosive.

KT: We’ve both experienced the environment of working in mainstream legacy news outlets. One thing I keep coming back to is how typically men in positions of leadership, I’m sure women as well, have told reporters how to respond to and think about online harassment. I remember a top male editor made a comment in response to me being harassed, which was an issue raised by a male colleague of mine, that it’s an occupational hazard. The conversation was shut down with that. That is in addition to social media policies that often prevent us from responding to harassment at all or in the way we want. It’s compounding layers of harassment and violence and then institutional betrayal.

AD: The point about the occupational hazard is ridiculous. One of the premises of this book is that we should not accept things that are unacceptable. When you accept smaller-scale violence, it builds permission for larger-scale violence. This is not a way to live. This is not an inevitable, unsolvable problem. It's going to require huge pressure and major solutions at every level. But we humans created these things, we built them, we decide how they work and what they can do. We imbue them with meaning and value, and we can create something different. So that bothers me a lot.

I came across a statistic from the International Women's Media Foundation that said of women journalists who had experiences with online abuse, 40% avoided reporting on certain stories as a result. That is not an occupational hazard. That is a sociopolitical problem. It is a problem of narrowing the stories that we are willing to write, the stories that we are willing to tell. It is narrowing the questions that we are willing to ask. There are women who are not doing certain reporting, who are not doing certain research, because they are afraid for their safety. That is not an issue of the individual woman's hurt feelings or even the harm to her life. Abuse is a violence and a problem that shudders through the whole of society. So if you're okay with people self-censoring and not asking certain questions about society and not reporting factually on things that should be reported on, then I guess you can call that an occupational hazard, but I don't call that an occupational hazard. I call that a problem where we cannot have a healthy democracy. This is not an acceptable price to pay.

KT: I could easily talk to you about this for several more hours, but the last thing I’ll ask you about is X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Under Elon Musk, the platform has shifted to encourage online harassment in a really notable way. After the 2024 election in the U.S., I left X. I didn’t make a plan to leave. I don’t think everyone can or necessarily should leave. And I still go peek at what’s happening over there. But I moved almost entirely to Bluesky. And I wonder, do you think part of moving forward is going to be divesting from these environments where online harassment has been encouraged to thrive?

AD: I'm always really reluctant to be prescriptive, just because I feel like people use these platforms for so many different reasons. The reasons why I'm there are not the reasons why another woman or marginalized person are there. People use these spaces in ways that can be lifesaving. There are people who probably wouldn't have the kinds of careers that they have, able to do the kind of work that they're doing, to call out abuses of power. I do think that a lot of these platforms are profiting off of our abuse. They are mining our data. They are surveilling us. They do not care about us, they have almost an antagonistic relationship with us at this point. I think to the extent that you feel like some of these places don't philosophically align with your values and if you can leave and find a different, better, safer, more equitable alternative, I think that’s a conversation with yourself worth having.

I think it gets a little tricky. You have a lot of Indigenous activists who have used these platforms to have a voice and to self-define and to call attention to issues that are important to their communities, and these platforms are totally antithetical to a lot of their values. You have this difficult sort of conundrum where you're like, “Okay, can I exploit the platform to do the things that I feel are so necessary to inch us closer to that more fair, more equitable, more just world that we also deeply deserve?” I don't think there's an easy answer. I will tell you that right now I'm exploiting the platforms. I do not want to be on any of these platforms. And I am doing book promotion. I am trying to reach an audience, and I do not know in this current environment how to do that without being in some of these places, but it feels awful. The book includes this framework for oppression from feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye, and she talks about oppression being basically defined by the double bind. No matter what you do, there is a cost. No matter what you do, there is a penalty. I feel that so acutely with this. If you stay, there's a cost. If you leave, there's a cost. And that is why this cannot be an issue that individual women are meant to solve, because nothing we do is going to be sufficient. This is why we need structural solutions to the problem.