Organizing Online Harassment of Harassment Victims

Many posts have discussed the political uses and abuses of social media.

 Nicholas Fandos at NYT:

The menacing posts began cropping up on Twitter last September just hours after a former aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York sued him over sexual harassment claims.

The tweets attacked the aide, Charlotte Bennett, in starkly personal terms. “Your life will be dissected like a frog in a HS science class,” read one of the most threatening, which also featured a photo of Ms. Bennett dancing at a bar in lingerie.

The post was part of a thread written by Anna Vavare, a leader of a small but devoted group of mostly older women who banded together online to defend Mr. Cuomo from a cascade of sexual misconduct claims that led to his resignation in August 2021. But it turns out, her tweets had secretly been ordered up by someone even closer to the former governor’s cause: Madeline Cuomo, his sister.

In the hours before the posts went live that morning, Ms. Cuomo exchanged dozens of text messages with Ms. Vavare and another leader of the pro-Cuomo group We Decide New York, Inc., pushing the activists to target Ms. Bennett, one of the first women to accuse Mr. Cuomo of sexual harassment. She appeared to invoke her brother’s wishes.

Journalist Safety

Lucy Westcott at the Committee to Project Journalists:

When I surveyed female and gender non-conforming journalists in the U.S. and Canada earlier this year about their views and experiences, the respondents recalled unwanted sexual advances, explicit voicemails threatening rape or violence, and how threats from an angry reader exposed a newsroom’s lack of emergency planning. Respondents also spoke of the toll to mental health from dealing with such attacks.

The survey—part of my research as CPJ’s James W. Foley Fellow—aimed to highlight the main issues and inform new guidance as part of CPJ’s Emergencies Department’s safety kit of resources for journalists out in the field.

Based on the survey’s findings, CPJ has released additional safety guidance on how to better protect yourself online, including ways to remove personal information from the internet to help prevent being doxed: the public release of personal information such as phone numbers or addresses that makes it easier to identify and harass someone; information for journalists who work alone; and advice on how to protect your mental health in the event of an online attack.

CPJ Safety Survey - Sept 2019
Infogram

Second Thoughts on Bill Clinton

At The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan writes the Democrats were wrong to look away from Bill Clinton's sexual harassment:

When more than a dozen women stepped forward and accused Leon Wieseltier of a serial and decades-long pattern of workplace sexual harassment, he said, “I will not waste this reckoning.” It was textbook Wieseltier: the insincere promise and the perfectly chosen word. The Democratic Party needs to make its own reckoning of the way it protected Bill Clinton. The party needs to come to terms with the fact that it was so enraptured by their brilliant, Big Dog president and his stunning string of progressive accomplishments that it abandoned some of its central principles. The party was on the wrong side of history, and there are consequences for that. Yet expedience is not the only reason to make this public accounting. If it is possible for politics and moral behavior to coexist, then this grave wrong needs to be acknowledged. If Weinstein and Mark Halperin and Louis C. K. and all the rest can be held accountable, so can our former president and so can his party, which so many Americans so desperately need to rise again.

Matthew Yglesias at Vox:

At the time I, like most Americans, was glad to see Clinton prevail and regarded the whole sordid matter as primarily the fault of congressional Republicans’ excessive scandal-mongering. Now, looking back after the election of Donald Trump, the revelations of massive sexual harassment scandals at Fox News, the stories about Harvey Weinstein and others in the entertainment industry, and the stories about Roy Moore’s pursuit of sexual relationships with teenagers, I think we got it wrong. We argued about perjury and adultery and the meaning of the word “is.” Republicans prosecuted a bad case against a president they’d been investigating for years.

What we should have talked about was men abusing their social and economic power over younger and less powerful women.