danieldwilliam | On Anti-Feminist Twitter Abuse

I was on Twitter last night thrilling the world with the occasional wry remark about the World Cup and catching up on Sarah Boyak’s view on localism
when I happened upon someone I follow being abused. She’d trigger some series of twitterbots using hacked accounts with some connection to Operation Men In Charge which were filling her timeline with some foul language, sexual slurs, anti-feminist abuse and what I think are some Men’s Rights Activist / Conservative Christian slogans.

I’m not even sure that it was particularly directed at her politics. Just using her politics as lever to get some jollies out of being rude to someone.

Upsetting but I think ultimately harmless – if you know that it’s not dozens of actual people typing vitriolic hate mail to you and are prepared to wade through hours of profanity. I suspect less harmless if you didn’t know it was just some 12 year old with some script he’d nicked being a dickhead or if you’d had lots of personally targeted abuse in the past or were having a bad day for some other reason. Her view on it appeared to be that it was tedious rather than upsetting. She’d had enough and was asking for some help reporting the spam. So I did and tweeted to say I had.

Which then triggered the spambots to target me. Which was tedious rather than upsetting. I think I must have blocked about 40 accounts last night.

I think it’s stopped now.

In any event I managed to get myself called a feminist enabler (whatever that might be). In my book, not the insult the Men’s Right movement might think it is.