Something you (I) hear women say a lot is “I don’t get trolled like you do.” There’s an inherent judgment in this: Maybe you have too many opinions, maybe you’re too loud about politics, maybe it’s your fault in some way. And: It’s not. It’s structural. It’s a biz model.
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Trolling is about engagement. Like Willie Sutton, who robbed banks because "that's where the money is," trolls and sock puppets and swarms SPECIFICALLY target people with high follower counts, verified checkmarks, and engaged followings because that's where the engagement is.
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The goal of trolling is to draw attention from a popular account. Here's why: When trolls, sock puppets or bots hurl abuse at a big account, they draw new followers or engagement (likes, RTs) that raise the troll's profile. And not just for fun: In algorithmic visibility.
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The way Twitter works, at a core level, is 1) you see more tweets from people who engage with you 2) the more a troll account engages with verified/big accounts, the more the troll is visible -- both to the account's followers AND site-wide
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This is a structural incentive for trolling. Trolls, bots, sock puppets are free-riders on the followings of big Twitter accounts. They're like little barnacles. Muting them doesn't work, because the game is to access the popular account's *followers*. Only blocking stops it.
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There is a tendency, because women are brainwashed by patriarchy, to believe getting trolled is the woman's fault: She spoke too much, or too confidently, or too much about male topics (politics, business) and if she could just be quieter, nicer, smaller, it wouldn't happen.
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"IIIIII don't get trolled," women say to other women, signalling that they know how to behave, how to please the patriarchy, how to speak so that no meaning is communicated and no one is discomfited by having to do any moral introspection.
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The truth is, if you're not getting trolled, it's not because you're an amazing communicator and everyone agrees with you. It's that your account 1) is too small to promise much engagement 2) doesn't cross many lines into "male" territory (including opinions of all kinds)
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Trolling is almost mathematic. At 10K followers it starts in earnest. At 20K it becomes more obvious and you see more swarms. At 50K Twitter becomes largely unusable for women on a daily basis.
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This is, as the movies say, not personal. It's business. You can't "nice" your way out of getting trolled. It's math. The other option -- not talking about important subjects -- is voluntary self-erasure. It's meant to keep women out of male political, business, media spaces.
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What you see when you spend enough time on Twitter is that “drawing trolling” is not some kind of commentary on your virtuous speech or lack thereof, it’s a play for engagement. More followers makes someone an appealing target because they have more chance of replies.
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The internalized misogyny part is that this line is often delivered by women, who have been taught that they can only survive by fitting the patriarchal idea of a woman -- small, and subservient to male interests.
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These women love to police other women, to attack them on behalf of men, to suggest that only if women weren't quite so *definite,* or had *so many opinions,* or could *stay in their lane* -- well then, you see, you could achieve the false and empty ideal of female likeability.
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Here's the problem with that: The patriarchy will not reward you for following their rules. They want you to agree to step aside and shut up and let the boys make the rules, and they like to make examples of women who stick their heads up, to show to never challenge them again.
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When you enforce patriarchal views of women's speech, you are not, despite what you think, winning brownie points with the boys. The boys think you're shit too, just like the women they're attacking. They just appreciate that you're dumb enough to assist them in oppressing you.
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The fact that this social media math specifically works against women is not an accident. Start paying attention to how often prominent women here get swarmed by trolls or bots. Several times a day. It could just be the world's greatest coincidence, sure, okay.
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Or it could be a sign that social media thrives on *structural* misogyny. If you are good enough at your job to draw a large following, you've also hit the level where your speech and power are the same as -- and thus dangerous to -- the system that privileges white male speech.
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This is what a lot of younger women don't understand. They think it's cute and cool to attack other women (whether for $4-a-word or otherwise) to show how edgy they are and how they're not like other women, they're cool enough to disrespect women like the dudes do.
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And what happens is that you realize, when you get any kind of power that is equivalent to what a man would get -- a big following, a big title -- that men do not consider you "one of them" for it. They just consider you someone who has things that rightfully belong to a man.
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When you're young+powerless it's easy to believe you just need to align with male power to get your own. But that's not what happens. Ask *any* woman who gets authority: The attitude men have is not "wow, she's one of us now, an equal, capable human" but "how did she get here?"
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So you should know that every woman with a large following, a big career, a title -- not the little titles, the big ones that men want -- had to work really hard to make that space, against a lot of resistance.
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And the trolling, bots, sock puppets, swarms -- almost always male-dominated but heavily supported by women who have never experienced authority or autonomy -- are just a way to take that hard-earned space away from women again.
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So the next time you see someone preening about not getting trolled, please take into account these dynamics. The algorithmic incentives to harass women, misogyny from men, and internalized misogyny from women. People project their fears on anyone who's prominent-esp women.
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As a funny, distantly related anecdote: I was young (28) when I first became chief of an international bureau. It was the usual "promote our best reporters into management" type of thing. I didn't actually want it but I figured: Gotta grow up sometime.
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And as a senior reporter then, immersed in my beat, I received so much praise and support from my male colleagues. "Killer scoop," "good story," lots of respect and pats on the back. When I got promoted, though, elbows got a lot sharper. I was surprised- and dismayed.
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I thought it was me, I really did, although of course no one changes that much in a month. I felt the urge to even nicer, even smaller, show I was unthreatening. (It didn't work, they just pushed harder). One Q they asked a lot: "How many people do you manage?"
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I was so thrown off by the question. Who cared? The point was to have a well-functioning bureau, not preen and swagger about it. I ran this by a friend -- a lesbian, from Belfast, so we're talking absolutely fearless -- and she explained what was going on.
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"When they ask you how many people you manage," she said, "they're really asking how big your d*ck is." (


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The idea is the job was a "man's" job so I would be judged on "man" metrics. And she was right. I got it.Prikaži ovu nit -
And I realized that my interests and those of the patriarchy were not aligned. I don't talk about myself here a lot but I feel that anecdote may help another woman to recognize that being smaller doesn't make you safer. You can't be small enough.
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You also can't succeed by being small. And you won't be rewarded for it. So don't tell yourself to be quieter and don't tell other women to be quieter. It's pointless. The opposite: Think bigger. Speak more. Have more opinions. Leave your lane. That's how you make your space.
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