Lucy Mangan: net trolls and the currency of hate
From the £10 note campaign to having grey hair... it takes very little to trigger a barrage of threats
Lucy Mangan
www.theguardian.com 'If you're boring in real life, you'll be boring on Twitter. If you are a violent-minded women-hater, you can go online and issue vile threats.' Photograph: Niall Carson/PA
It is a truism that you can't lie on Twitter. Micro-posts don't allow for artifice, evasion or subtle modulations of tone. If you're boring in real life, you'll be boring on Twitter, however hard you try. If you're exuberant, charming or funny in real life, it will shine through, however little you try. If you're essentially a neurotic, leading a life forever circumscribed by incessant second-guessing, your tweets will be, to use the technical term applied recently to my own Twoutput by someone we shall refer to only as an unloved relative, timid and pointless crap. And so on.
The only thing you can do is lie about your name. This, alas, is when people feel able to be their truest selves. And so, if you are a violent-minded women-hater, say, or a man so insecure about himself and his sex's position in the world that you cannot bear the slightest scintilla of an iota of a shadow of a speck of a threat to that position, you can go online and issue threats so vile that anyone who wants to write or talk about them is semi-silenced before he or she even begins, because they cannot be safely quoted in any other public context.
So it was and has been with Caroline Criado-Perez, journalist, founder of thewomensroom.org.uk (an online database of XX-chromosomed experts, set up in response to the BBC's claim last year that it could never find any to be on the Today programme) and, most recently, campaigner to keep women – or at least a woman – on our currency after the Bank of England said it was replacing its single laydee, Elizabeth Fry, with Winston Churchill.
Criado-Perez succeeded, but on the day it was announced that Jane Austen would be gracing our tenners from 2017, Twitter trolls launched a barrage of rape and death threats against her. I say trolls. I mean men, of the aforementioned violent-minded women-hating kind. Labour MP Stella Creasy was subjected to more of the same when she publicly supported Criado-Perez after a man was arrested in relation to the tweets.
In the days that have followed, just about every aspect of this alternately distressing, frightening, enraging situation has been examined – both on its own terms and, of course, in terms of how it compares to all the other recent cases in which women (such as classics don and presenter Mary Beard, who insists on appearing on television to share a lifetime's knowledge with us despite having grey hair; and Lucy-Anne Holmes, who began the No More Page 3 campaign last year when she realised that… well, that it was 2012 and we still have Page 3) who speak up and have to brave the abusive wrath of men who cannot bear to see them take up a fraction more of the mental, aural, cyber or any other kind of space than those men deem appropriate.
What distresses and frightens me most, though, is how little it takes to trigger these avalanches of hatred. It seems to show that the gains we thought we'd made, the lives we think we lead, are built on a veneer of civilisation so thin that none of us – man, woman or child – can depend on it to bear any stress at all. I hope, I hope that Twitter can lie.
