Standing with Stella

I’m going to make what should be an uncontroversial statement and work from there. Here we go:

“Threatening to rape or murder someone because you disagree with them is unacceptable, and against the law.”

Now surely that’s something that anyone who is not completely deranged or unstable would agree with. Only a tiny handful of people would ever dream of approaching someone they disagreed with on the street to tell them that they were planning to rape them. But the Internet – the most wonderful invention in history – also has a dark side. Shrouded in the cloak of anonymity lurk “trolls” who pour forth their most vile thoughts directly at their intended target.

Want to tell someone you don’t like or disagree with something diabolically foul, or just irritate them on a daily basis? Are they on Twitter? You’re in luck. You can send your bile straight to their phone, pipe it directly into their house or make it the first thing they read in the morning.

Twitter, which I love by the way, is the ideal tool for the aggressive, angry malcontent.

Anyone who is a give online is likely to have been trolled. I know I have trolls, blathering away somewhat obsessively about me, or LabourList, or both. Yet the sort of trolling I get is not so much unpleasant or sick and twisted as boring. It’s terrifyingly dull. It’s repetitive nonsense. And it’s rarely -so far – particularly personal.

The same can’t be said for any woman who writes online, or campaigns online or even – sadly – who deigns to have views online*. I’ve seen fantastic female writers lose the desire to keep going because of the torrent of abuse they’ve faced. I’ve seen brilliant campaigners forced to wade through the social media version of a sewer after achieving any kind of success. The Everyday Sexism project gives us a window into the misogyny thats all too prevalent both online and offline. And now I’ve seen an MP – one of the best campaigning MPs we have – subjected to rape and murder threats for having the audacity to a) campaign for a solitary female figure to appear on our banknotes and b) stand up to those who would make rape threats.

Creasy was right to take this up with the police – it’s clearly worthy of investigation and a clampdown on genuinely threatening and harassing behaviour online should be welcomed. That the trolls believed they were immune from being investigated by the police (closing down accounts and opening new ones moments later) shows that they both underestimated the police, the law and the tenacity of Stella Creasy. No-one who has even the most basic knowledge of Stella would ever doubt her tenacity or her willingness to stand up to bullies. It’s one of the reasons she’s popular in the party, and rightly so.

But taking these trolls to the police when they go too far isn’t enough on its own, and nor is expecting a relatively small company (which, in reality, is still what Twitter is) to regulate the Wild West they’ve created a feasible solution either – as the burden involved could mean that the trolls end up closing Twitter.

What is needed is for us all to stand with Stella and take on vile trolling, abuse and sexist/violent threats whenever we see them online – that includes you too, men of the Internet. The entire Twitter community needs to self-police itself. We need to make trolling a complete waste of time by ridiculing the trolls and driving them away. We need to drown every vile abusive tweet under an avalanche of responses telling these idiots to scrawl their abuse on some other toilet door.

We need to take back Twitter, together. Because if we don’t, the trolls will win, those with opinions will be forced to face a torrent of shit every time they tweet and any value that Twitter provides will be lost. Which, as someone who tweets all day every day, I think would be a damn shame.

* – this isn’t completely limited to women. Take a look at what Owen Jones, for example, gets tweeted at him every day. It’s mind boggling. But he never, to my knowledge, gets rape and murder threats.