Adrienne Lafrance’s story in The Atlantic about online harassment is an excellent, thought-provoking read. She describes her online conversation with someone who sent a mean tweet to her:
Finally, I asked him if I should have even responded to him at all. His responses were fascinating to me, but was the exchange worthwhile for him?
“Absolutely,” he wrote. “I’m pretty embarrassed by how I acted and being called out on it was extremely helpful. I definitely need to more often step back and think a bit more before. I usually do; sometimes I fail.”
The exchange felt to me like a tiny victory for civility in the Internet age, but it probably doesn’t make sense to try to change the world one commenter at a time. Not only is that approach mentally exhausting, but it’s potentially dangerous. Before I even responded to the man who had insulted me, I scrolled through his tweets to be sure he didn’t seem unhinged. I chatted with coworkers who had seen his tweet. I proceeded with caution. And besides all that, the kinds of tweets and comments that can be considered harassment are in an entirely different, much scarier category than what I faced.
“When we think about problems of harassment or conflict, the overwhelming way we think is to consider ways to deal with that specific conflict, that specific troll and that specific person—and that often leads us to think about reactive responses, things that we can do after we spot something happening,” Matias, the MIT scholar told me. “But if we recognize that these problems are at least sometimes rooted in deeper social and cultural issues, there’s a huge scope for working on these problems at the deeper roots.“
“It may actually be,” Matias said, “that deeper social change that could have the larger impact.”
She also mentioned an episode of a 2015 This American Life that I missed:
In 2015, in a story for This American Life, the writer Lindy West told the moving story of how she confronted a man who had cruelly harassed her, assuming the identity of her deceased father on Twitter and using that account to send her insulting messages. First, she decided to write about the harassment in an article for the website Jezebel, which prompted the man to email her to apologize, which prompted West to ask him if he’d talk to her about why he’d harassed her, which led to one of the most remarkable pieces of radio I’ve ever heard. (Please listen for yourself. It’s really that good.)