Abstract
In the relative anonymity of the online world, mudslinging has turned violent, writes
OF ALL THE events that Index has run in my time at the organisation – from those on Tiananmen Square to others about cancel culture – it was not a talk on science that I expected to be the most controversial. How wrong I was.
Last October we launched our autumn magazine – which looked at the various ways scientists are censored – at the UK’s Liverpool John Moores University. On the panel we had Paul Garner, professor emeritus in evidence-based public health in infectious diseases. In Garner’s biography on the event flyer was this sentence: “Paul developed the post-Covid-19 condition and recovered using neuroplastic strategies.”
We were unaware at the time that such a sentence was highly inflammatory. In the weeks leading up to the event we found ourselves in a storm.
For background, the post-Covid-19 condition is known colloquially as “long Covid”. Garner suffered from it during the pandemic and wrote about his struggles. As part of this he said he’d developed empathy for those with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), a chronic illness that causes extreme fatigue and is little understood.
Those with ME are often frustrated by a medical establishment that they feel dismisses their symptoms. And Garner, too, felt he was being dismissed. Writing about this he became a hero within the ME community. The problem came when he underwent an intense programme – the “neuroplastic strategies” (such as mindfulness and meditation) referred to in his bio – which he believed lifted him out of his long Covid. When he discussed this publicly, he became persona non grata. He was not just shunned – he was subjected to death threats.
So when his name appeared as part of our event we were hounded and threatened, too, and had to get extra security.
No idea is sacred. All are up for debate, and we don’t have to agree on everything. We also don’t have to agree civilly. If someone wants to tell me that I’m an idiot for thinking Dirty Dancing is the best film of all time, so be it. People are entitled to their opinions and to their rage. But for free speech – the most sacred of rights – to work, there are lines… and sending death threats quite clearly crosses them.
Sadly, this isn’t the first time recently I’ve come across topics that don’t seem to be controversial (or at least that controversial) being met with extreme abuse.
Consider a few more: journalist Lewis Goodall was caught off-guard by a raging response when he announced his plans to travel to the Faroe Islands, whose reputation is chequered because of its whaling tradition. A researcher published a fact-based piece in The Lancet about the death toll in Gaza and got death threats – as did literature researcher Ally Louks after she shared a photo of her thesis title: “Olfactory Ethics: The politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose”. US meteorologists feared for their lives simply for tracking the advance of hurricanes Milton and Helene.
But among the most surprising was the response to an article by Nadim Sadek in The Bookseller. Last October, Sadek argued that artificial intelligence could help the creatively challenged become better writers. He later told me that he’d have been “naïve to think that writing about AI at the moment, especially when there is an almost primal fear of it and its ‘generative’ capacity, would always be met with sanguine responses…” Still, he was shocked by the reaction.
“One said, ‘Nadim Sadek should be held down by all the authors of the world and made to watch his family burn in his house’,” he told me. “I mean, it’s deeply unpleasant. These sorts of things can stir up a nasty momentum.”
He was particularly upset by the way his children had to deal with it.
“They’re powerless to protect me from this sort of thing and that impotence in the face of threatened death really made them unhappy.”
Some of the above examples I’ve read online; others I’ve been told about casually in passing – over coffee, at dinner, in a children’s play centre – as if they’re totally normal. The fact that people don’t seem particularly alarmed is understandable – for years politicians and public figures, especially female ones, have experienced insufferable violence online and it’s been normalised.
We’ve reached a new era where vitriol appears to be rampant online, writes Jemimah Steinfeld
CREDIT: Olga Yastremska / Alamy
In 2014, for example, Reuters columnist Jack Shafer wrote an article crediting the internet with creating a “golden age of death threats”. He gave examples of actresses, writers, tech executives, professional athletes and even video game designers who had received such threats, and wrote: “Advanced technology has removed most of the work and hazard from sending cowardly messages to people to frighten them.”
Five years later, Vice published an article saying we had entered the “platinum” age:
“Some days in the Trump era, it can feel like death threats have become Americans’ preferred way of communicating,” it read. The list of victims was long and the article said “threats are so commonplace for members of Congress that news reports now describe them as a ‘way of life’”.
Today, with the net growing wider still, it’s arguably time to coin it “the diamond age”. Want further proof that this isn’t just hyperbole? Google “Are death threats becoming more common online?” You’ll be flooded with more recent examples.
From a cursory search, last year alone had German broadcaster Deutsche Welle running the headline “Digital death threats in sport: There’s no space to run”, coupled with the subhead “Cyberbullying has long been a problem for athletes on social media, but for many the issue is evolving into a more sinister reality”.
US broadcaster NBC wrote: “Local officials increasingly targeted for threats and harassment, new data shows”, and research reported on The Conversation said 74% of UK academics had received some form of extreme abuse online.
Who exactly is making all these threats? I’m almost too scared to ask. There’s every chance, given we know so many people who receive them, that we might know people who make them.
That said, my curiosity gets the better of me and I go searching, only to find many articles on the victims and very little on the perpetrators, which feels like a problem in itself. It’s important to understand the impact of the threats but it’s also important to understand what impulses are driving those who are making them.
Let’s stick with the impact, though. For the victims, the toll is unsurprisingly huge – both professionally and personally. At its most extreme, the stress for them has been reported to lead to hospital admissions and even suicide. For society, the impact is perhaps bigger still. People leave certain careers; others don’t enter them at all. And all the while people are less vocal online, they self-censor, they don’t engage in conversations, and our pool of those who are willing to speak becomes smaller and smaller.
While I’m unsure of what comes after diamond in the world of rankings, I can only imagine what it would look like online: a digital space where the only people left are those slinging threats at one another. An effective way to get them to taste their own medicine, perhaps, but not a race to the bottom that anyone should be part of.
Footnotes