Rather than sticking with the commonly advocated refrain of “don’t feed the trolls”, women (and other minority groups) are starting to bite back against this online abuse. Increasingly, bloggers are calling on women to sink to the level of misogynists and out their attackers.
An abusive email sent to Feministing from a university student email address – which just happened to belong to the public relations officer for the Republican club of Southern Illinois University College in the US – is just one example. He was outed and various faculty members were contacted by blog supporters. As a result, he was removed from the Republican club and made a public apology on the blog comments (although this was more of a “sorry to have been caught” than a “sorry I did it”).
Criado-Perez and Creasy’s treatment has resulted in the arrest of one man on harassment charges and forced Twitter to address the way abusive tweets are reported.
A recent campaign targeting Facebook resulted in a commitment from them to address gender hate as strictly as other forms on their site.
Hastie reports that Caroline Criado-Perez (mentioned in the block quote above) was brutally threatened with rape and murder on Twitter because of her campaign to put novelist Jane Austen on the 10 pound note.
This definitely belongs in the "stranger than fiction category." As Rebecca Mead writes for the New Yorker, "Who could object to the honoring of genteel, beloved Jane?" As Hastie and Mead both report, quite a few somebodies could. And in this case, resistance has proved both necessary and effective.
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