Your bag is empty.
Five years ago, at just 19 years old, I started receiving hateful comments on Instagram from a fake account. This person would shame me via direct messages and in comments. They would criticize my body and my intelligence—the body I celebrate and the intelligence I use in an attempt to provide the sex education I lacked growing up.
Underneath one of my photos, for example, where I stare at the camera on my bed in my pajamas, the person I only knew as @djballi233 wrote, “Your mom is rolling in her grave.” I blocked the account and a new one was created within the hour, growing angrier each comment. “I hope…you get buttraped and die” It was a cycle that continued for weeks…and then it stopped.
A few months passed. I exhaled. I thought to myself, “The worst is over.”
I was wrong.
The summer of 2015 came with scorching heat and this troll’s comeback—with renewed aggression to burn. Blanket insults about my appearance graduated to deeply personal attacks on not just me, but on my family. They created a separate account, wholly dedicated to shaming me. They followed everyone I know—even people I grew up with in Seattle, far away from my current New York community. They concocted a narrative that we were high school friends, that we used to do drugs together, that they knew me to be “cynical” and “manipulative,” and that I helped someone stalk them.
My bully was trying to go viral.
I tried to report the account but nothing happened. Every authority I tried to talk to advised I just “ignore it.” Unnerved by the mounting aggression displayed in this stranger’s posts, I went to the police. While they acknowledged that this bully’s behavior was disturbing, in the eyes of the law, what this person was saying and doing wasn’t technically illegal. No one could understand how a person I never met could make me feel physically unsafe.
You are reading these words on the internet, but it is time for new protections to be put into place—especially given that the people behind the most influential platforms are so good at protecting us against what they deem necessary.
If this same harassment were taking place in a non-virtual realm, perhaps at school, I’d like to believe that even the most forgiving school system would penalize such a bully. But because my tormenter was invisible, I was told nothing could be done. I felt like I was losing my mind; while I couldn’t identify my bully in a police lineup, the resulting emotional distress from their actions was very real. I was only 19 years old and the virtual spaces I had once enjoyed had become my worst nightmare. How bad did the abuse have to get for people to start taking me seriously?
Apparently, the breaking point was posting death threats attached with my home address and pictures of my late mom online. Months of vicious hate speech and approximately 45 fake accounts later, the situation was finally deemed grave enough to warrant legal action.
Teenagers today apparently spend more time online than they do in the classroom. According to Pew Research in 2018, 95 percent of kids ages 13 to 17 have access to a smartphone and 45 percent of them admit to being on their phones “almost constantly.” But there are few systems in place to protect them against online harassment. This is even more troubling when you consider the emotional weight teens put on virtual interactions. Who is advocating for young people’s online safety?
I run an online sexual health resource for young people called Killer And a Sweet Thang. It was banned in Saudi Arabia last year. I’ve built my career on the very subject people deem most taboo: sex. I am not blind to the fact that I was able to gain a following and a platform because of the internet. You are reading these words on the internet, but it is time for new protections to be put into place—especially given that the people behind the most influential platforms are so good at protecting us against what they deem necessary.
The moment I upload a photo with even just part of my nipple showing, it will be removed within the hour alongside a long explanation about the removal. “Respect everyone on Instagram, don’t spam people or post nudity,” notes Instagram on its Community Guidelines page—alongside tabs that read “learn how to address abuse” and “tips for parents.” So if Instagram can so vigilantly censor women’s bodies, why can’t they ban an individual that is degrading and attacking me for months?
I’m an advocate for freedom of speech, but I’m concerned that the laws are not keeping up with the times. How much experience do the people in Washington, who regulate the internet, personally have with these social platforms themselves? Why is it that you can get fired from a job if an ex posts nudes of you, but it’s extremely difficult to press charges against a person who violates your privacy? Revenge porn, as it’s called, is illegal in 40 states, but it’s usually treated as a simple misdemeanor.
Most people (meaning the ones who didn’t grow up on the internet) tell us to unplug. Sure, we can remove the apps from our smart phones, but our society is far beyond the ability to entirely remove social media from our lives. For one, it’s where we get our news. It’s where we stay in touch. It’s where we network. It’s where we—myself included—start and maintain businesses. It’s where the #MeToo movement launched in October of 2017. It’s where more than a million of us organized across the country to come together and March For Our Lives on March 24, 2018.
Deleting social media, in response to a few trolls, would ignore the endless ways the most major networks have changed our lives (and continue to change our lives) for the better.
In 2018, Morgan Stanley valued Google’s YouTube at over $160 biillion. Facebook and Instagram together are worth more $62 billion. Twitter is worth nearly $25 billion. Snap is worth $24 billion. Now, it’s time to invest some of that success into protections for users. And if they are genius enough to come up with business that didn’t exist at the time of fruition, then they’re fully capable of coming up with a solution for harassment.