If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Our mothers, fathers and second-grade teachers have been touting the mantra since our recess days, but the Internet seems to be fostering a new variation of this golden rule — if you don’t have anything nice to say, say it anonymously.

Freelance journalist Amanda Hess drew the troubling situation into the mainstream last week with an article titled “Why Women Aren’t Welcomed on the Internet”, posted to social science magazine Pacific Standard’s website on Jan. 6. Through statistics, interviews and examples of the offensive commentary and violent threats hurled at female writers who post on the Internet, Hess garnered significant attention and prompted reactionary pieces from major news organizations such as The New York Times, The Atlantic and Mother Jones.

Hess describes her experiences and those of other female writers on the Internet, including attacks on physical appearance, vulgar sexual messages and graphic threats of rape and decapitation from anonymous users. These assaults are met with dismissal and disinterest on the part of law enforcement. More attention will need to be paid to the frightening and surprisingly common reality faced by female writers on the Internet for an effective change to occur.

Hess acknowledges that writing in a public forum naturally invites abuse.

For every person who takes advantage of a comment section pass along an insight that could further a story, there’s likely someone trying to stir up a reaction with an ignorant or offensive comment.

But the problem develops in the gendered nature of these attacks.
More than 70 percent of the Web-users who reported harassment incidents to the organization Working to Halt Online Abuse between 2000 and 2012 were female, Hess cites in her article. Atlantic writer Conor Frieserdorf bolsters this statistic with personal anecdotes in his own reactionary article. Frieserdorf thought he had dealt with insulting, vulgar commentary in his own professional career — until he briefly managed the email accounts of a female co-worker.

“I’d never been exposed to anything like it before,” he wrote of the vicious personal attacks that flooded his co-worker’s inbox.

In spite of — or perhaps because of — the quantity and severity of offensive commentary, law enforcement tends to treat this particular brand of Internet threat lightly, musing that anonymous, would-be rapists and murderers are likely 50-year-old burnouts in their parents’ basements.

But ignoring a pattern of virtual abuse that can seriously affect women’s mental and emotional well-being, cost them time and money in keeping record of and reporting threats and ultimately dissuade them from embracing an active voice in the blogging world is not the right answer.

Anonymity cannot be the mask that enables this proliferation of vitriol to continue. It makes threats of sexual violence so common that collective eyebrows aren’t even raised.

It’s time to acknowledge the situation as problematic and demand once again; if you don’t have anything beneficial to say to a woman on the Internet, don’t say anything at all.

Nicki Gorny is a junior magazine journalism and Spanish double major. She can be reached at nagorny@syr.edu.

Published on January 14, 2014 at 1:48 am