As the country reels at racist online abuse directed at the England footballers Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho, news breaks of another form of online trolling, routinely directed at an entirely other kind of target, perpetuated by an entirely other kind of troll.
This week Em Sheldon, a 27-year-old “influencer” — the online self-made celebrity figures hired by commercial brands to advertise products on Instagram — told MPs on the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee that she, along with others of her profession, deal with daily online attacks from people whose “sole mission is to ruin our lives’’.
“I am very concerned that there will be more suicides and more depression because in which other industry are you allowed to be constantly, relentlessly attacked every single day just for existing?”
Sheldon — who promotes fashion and lifestyle products to 117,000 Instagram followers — continued. “People hate influencers. They are so angry at us making money.” Perhaps Sheldon’s biggest revelation was that the abuse she and other influencers receive comes predominantly from other women. “Grown women with children; these aren’t 15-year-old girls . . . They say: ‘Right, I am going to ruin this person’s life, I’m going to destroy that business.’ ”
The traditional image of a “troll” — one who spends their time abusing others online as a twisted, peculiar form of recreation — is distinctly male. Oafish, aggressive, anonymous, politically unenlightened with racist, misogynistic and/or homophobic undertones, inclined towards physical threats — of violence, rape, death — overall vile, in a blatant, classically, poisonously, obviously masculine way.
The assumption that all virtual violence perpetuated on the internet is uniquely male has meant that social media is regularly damned as a dangerous place for women — yet another space within which toxic masculinity thrives.
The first rumblings that this might not be the whole truth about trolling came last month from Chrissy Teigen, the model, entrepreneur and wife of the musician John Legend. Teigen, who had spent the past decade establishing herself as one of the foremost wits of social media, outed herself as “a troll, full stop, and I am so sorry”, after it transpired some of her online witticisms were, in fact, acts of cruelty directed at people who had done nothing much to deserve them.
This confused and distressed her millions of internet fans, many of whom had witnessed Teigen’s trolling in real time, except that rather than decrying it they had actively enjoyed it, which made them question their own morality (no one likes to do that), but also upended their idea of what a troll even is. Teigen being famous, ie the opposite of anonymous, and also, in her feminist-presenting public persona and her inarguable feminine beauty, being the very opposite of male.
I wasn’t as surprised as others — either by Teigen’s terrible moment of self-awareness or Sheldon’s testimony about female trolls. As a journalist, and an unofficial, incredibly low-key dabbler in the world of influencing, a half-in, half-out Instagrammer whose nearly 18,000 followers hardly compares with Em Sheldon’s 117,000 or Teigen’s 35 million, never mind the 248 million of Kylie Jenner (the half-sister of Kim Kardashian, arguably the most influential influencer of them all), my experience has been that women can be every bit as troll-inclined as men.
Actually, my experience, like that of Sheldon, is that women are worse; although I accept this is because my audience is principally female. Male readers and Instagram users don’t troll me because they barely know I exist — certainly not in the way women do anyway.
I’ve learnt a lot about the way women wage internet war against other women in the 20 years since my journalism — along with everyone else’s — was thrown open to below-the-line commentary, and online forums such as Mumsnet launched; the ten years since I joined Twitter; the six years since I published a book that proved unexpectedly controversial; the four years since I — as a laugh, and on a commission for Times Weekend — started punting myself as an occasional, distinctly half-arsed Instagram influencer, using a series of bikini shots.
My main takeaway is this: if men threaten and abuse anonymously, women sneer. We smear. We discredit, we demean, we dismiss as inauthentic. We shame. We denounce our targets as stupid, sick or dangerous. Above all — and this is something I realised only quite recently, when confronting a woman who had trolled me on Twitter, whom I happened upon in real life in a north London café – we have absolutely no clue that what we’re doing, these words and tactics we’re using, this abuse we’re disseminating, is trolling.
Far from it. We think it’s fair. Good — even righteous. When women troll, we often do it under the misapprehension that we’re somehow doing a good thing. Calling out “bad” behaviour, “helping” another woman realise she’s being somehow inappropriate (according to our own standards on appropriate, which are — oh, we’re so sure! — definitive.) Which is why we do it proudly, and under our own names and profile pictures.
My first experience of trolling wasn’t really trolling so much as one internet woman I didn’t know telling me that a bunch of other internet women I didn’t know were being mean behind my back (a tactic I’ve since come to recognise as “I just thought you should know — the other girls in the playground are being mean about you”).
I was directed to a comment thread on the parenting site Mumsnet, then still new, where a woman was explaining she had it on “good authority” I only ever landed work as a journalist by “getting down on [my] knees” and issuing sexual favours. “I hope this doesn’t make me sound unsisterly,” she added. (Uh, a bit, I thought.)
Someone else remembered the time they had followed me round a supermarket, silently hating me and everything about me, including the items she watched me place in my basket. Everyone else LOL’d. It was spite-addled, but I got over it — and the subsequent thread about how I’d be the first against a wall and shot “come the revolution” — because at that time getting roasted on Mumsnet was a bit like being an actor and having rumours circulate about your sexual depravity, ie the point at which you realise you’re doing OK, professionally, or why would they bother?
It escalated from there. A group of young women who identified as feminists and, for some reason I’ll never quite understand, held me personally responsible for every wrong the mainstream media had committed against their (and, indeed, my) gender, devoted themselves to “calling me out”, analysing my every article, my every tweet, for proof of internalised misogyny and evil intent.
Righteousness, I’ve noticed, hits Twitter’s system like cocaine, driving it to commit more and more extreme and questionable actions. I hit back, but there were more of them, they were so incredibly convinced they were right and I was just ineffably, endlessly awful, so a legitimate target . . . and heavens! It was exhausting.
When, in 2015, I published a book about modern feminism, which, among other things, identified the early stirrings of cancel culture and wondered if people might soon become so terrified to express their true opinions on social media that they would be reduced to silence, or just the most pointlessly anodyne utterances, I attracted so much negative internet attention from other women — such intense, persistent criticism not just of the ideas I proposed in the book, but of me, as a person, or rather: the person they assumed me to be that I cracked, just a little.
It’s very hard to explain the damage that kind of mass shaming does to a person; although, once you’ve experienced it, you know. When the war reporter Christina Lamb described her experiences of being trolled as worse than being kidnapped, ambushed, bombed and shot at, I was not surprised. Once I picked myself back up again — about a year later — I had hardened somewhat to the onslaught of female trolls.
I’d go back to bat with the internet a year after that, joining the campaign to extend abortion rights to Ireland — which is when I got trolled by the woman I’d later encounter in real life, the one who, when I asked her why she’d abused me, was genuinely perplexed. “I’m not a troll, I’m a person!” she said.
A year after that, when I started dabbling with Instagram influencing, followers deserted me at a rate of 50 to 100 per bikini post, pausing only to tell me I was boring them, shaming them about their own bodies, showing off and “acting like a cut-price [Elizabeth] Hurley”.
This amused rather than pained me — although I was struck by the part of Sheldon’s testimony that noted that abuse kicks in at the point where influencers (who develop their brand and following independently, building it up to a point where they can charge for advertising) start making money; not, I hasten to add, that I make any money from Instagram, although I do benefit from gifts, freebies that I promote if I think they’re worth it.
And if I understand how indulged I sound as I write those words, I also detect virulent woman-on-woman sexism in the belief that influencers are fair game, somehow deserving of abuse, because what they do is silly, inconsequential, fluffy, spoilt and (worst of all) inherently female — and never mind that some of them amount to mighty businesses in their own right, turning over hundreds of thousands of pounds annually.
I ask the journalist Katherine Ormerod (@katherine_ormerod), a friend, former colleague and far more successful, established and straight-out proper influencer than I’ll ever be, about her experiences of trolling by women.
“There are certain areas of the internet that have always attracted communities built around hate rather than love,” she replies (by Direct Message on Instagram – how else?) “Having worked in celebrity news in the Noughties, where we often walked a fine line between love and hate in our coverage, I can recognise the same atmosphere in the influencer economy today. Where once women rifled through [Jennifer Aniston’s] business, her fertility, her divorce . . . now the target has become the girl next door.
“ It has always been women that cared — men, in the main, are not the target audience for celebrity magazines. But while there are certainly biological imperatives in the female brain — which is geared far more to community building, which physiologically leads them to engage in gossip — the tearing down of the ‘tall poppy’ influencer isn’t necessarily a gendered issue. I think the schadenfreude people feel when someone who has been elevated in any context falls is pretty universal.”
Ormerod, like Sheldon — and, indeed, anyone who has offered any possible solutions to the issue of racist trolling — thinks that legal ramifications and tighter regulations of social media platforms would be a sensible move forward. I’d add, with particular reference to the way we women behave online: additional degrees of self-awareness might help to take the edge off trolling culture.
Should you ever feel inspired to tell a woman from the internet — a woman you don’t actually know, even though access to her social media feed might have engendered a fake sense of familiarity within you — why you think she’s wrong, or bad, or ugly, or boring, or stupid, or morally questionable, or too fat for that dress, or that her feet are too old for those sandals (genuine comment taken from the feed of @venswifestyle), just . . . don’t. What you’re itching to post might not be an anonymous rape threat, but nevertheless it’s trolling — and it’s not very nice.
