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Why a more feminist internet would be better for everyone
- jfengel 5y agoI believe the biggest single thing isn't mentioned in the article: take online threats seriously. That's not an Internet solution to the Internet problem, but physical threats are a meatspace problem and require a meatspace solution. As it is, it feels like an extension of the way many kinds of harassment and assault are ignored by police. "It's too hard to prove" or "his word against hers", and so it's just dropped. Death and rape threats on the Internet are treated as if everybody were behind seven proxies, and that's just not the case. They're treated as if the 99.99% chance that they're just some asshole blowing off steam means that they don't matter, but in fact you don't want to be the .01% and that means constant vigilance. Prosecuting death and rape threats wouldn't fix the Internet, but it would brush back some of it. The article's other suggestions are also interesting, and it's really important that we stop clean-sheeting every single discussion forum as if harassment weren't an issue. A "feminist internet" would take seriously the fact that harassment, real world and Internet, is a genuine thing and not an afterthought. There's a lot more to it: the article mentions some of the competition for status that the Internet feeds on, and that's largely orthogonal to the violence. But the violence is more visible and presents some more straightforward solutions: prosecute it.