August 2023
Based on an article I wrote for the Online Hate Prevention Institute, May 2020 https://ohpi.org.au/treading-water-in-an-ocean-of-hate/
Social media and waves of online hate
As a social media user, I visualise myself as immersed in a social ocean. I create waves as I pass messages on, and waves created by others buffet me. I imagine the spread of online hate as waves that crash over me, dragging me under, tossing me about. It reminds me of body surfing as a child. The wave dumps me on the beach, exhausted, and I wonder what might have happened if the wave had been stronger. There are also tiny waves of online hate that propagate for long distances and often pass through me unrecognised. That is when I am not the target and when I do not understand how the message impacts others.
As a target, the messages are frightening, making us feel angry and defensive. When under attack, we are tempted to immediately fire back a retort. However fighting makes us more visible and vulnerable. Our thrashing in the water attracts predators. What alternatives are there? Should we submit and absorb the wave’s energy? Should we ignore it and hide in the crowd, allowing its message to propagate?
TREADING WATER IN AN OCEAN OF HATE
When treading water, our line of sight is short. From this perspective it is difficult to trace a wave back to its original source. However, if we use the Huygens-Fresnel principle we understand the propagation of a wave by viewing every point on a wavefront as a source. Our understanding of the spread of online hate shifts from the distant to the local, and a possible solution emerges. We do not need to trace a message back to its source to stop it. We are all sources.
If we read a hateful message and ignore it, we act as a source of online hate. If instead, we refute it, we can alter its propagation by reducing the intensity of the hate. By adopting this viewpoint, we switch from an “us and them” scenario, to simply “us”. The problem of stopping the spread of hate is less overwhelming when we focus only on our own behaviour and the behaviour of our closest connections.
INSTIGATORS SPLIT US APART ALONG EXisTING CLEAVage PLANES
An instigator is an active propagator of hate. They either create a new message, or make an incremental change to the message they receive. They amplify the hate before passing it on. Instigators of online hate target our vulnerabilities, and our need to belong to a group. If we fail to recognise their strategy, we may mimic their patterns of behaviour, hoping to gain status and acceptance within their group. We adopt the same language and the same techniques and then we turn around and target others. The wave propagates. We expend very little energy and gain strength by riding the peak and becoming propagators of hate ourselves.
Instigators of hate often insult the intelligence of people who do not agree with them. Messages with an anti-science and anti-academic stance have no impact on my confidence levels. My academic qualifications give me confidence in my ability to think for myself. The instigators probably know that it is futile to attempt to convince people like me of their argument. When I am their target, their aim is to influence those around me who are less confident. The instigators succeed when they incite others to attack people who disagree with their insidious messages. They are sweeping people up in waves of hate and splitting social groups along already existing cleavage planes.
INSTIGATORS MUDDY THE WATERS WITH OUR RESPONSeS
Unfortunately, it is not that simple to create a response that reduces the intensity of a hateful message. What happens when we fire back a response? The wave captures it. The wave replicates parts of our response and fuses it with the original message. Sometimes the new message becomes a weapon against future targets. Our response mixes with the muddy water surrounding the peak of the wave, travelling with it and making the peak less visible to future targets. This makes it more likely that people like us will be drawn into it and become propagators themselves. Sometimes by responding, we make the message of hate more contagious.
The people in my social media circles who propagate anti-academic messages are not university educated and have likely never read an academic paper – yet sometimes they adopt the pseudo-academic language of the toxic messages they have consumed. The words “peer reviewed” come up a lot. This is a deliberate muddying of the waters passed on by the instigators of hate. They take the words of academics who have argued with them and swirl them into their own messages. The messages usually contain poor grammar and spelling mistakes, which would be amusing if it were not so insidious. In contrast to the propagators of the wave, the instigators of the original messages are often university educated. Sometimes I wonder if the grammatical quirks were deliberately introduced further back in the chain by educated instigators to appeal to those with lower education levels.
INSTIGATORS REWARD THOSE WHO DO THEIR DIRTY WORK
Instigators of online hate can target us in many ways. They often target our core belief systems – whether they be religious, spiritual, cultural or political. Their messages might suggest that they are morally superior, and they reward those who agree with them with praise and glorification. These are welcome rewards for people who feel isolated and unheard.
Creators of toxic messages often suggest that the majority agree with them – a tactic to make us feel alone and to undermine our courage – to make us feel that we are swimming alone against an enormous tide. It might feel tempting to join them, to feel less alone, and less exhausted, but it is worth remembering that the tide is not that strong, unless we are in a rip, and in that case we should conserve our energy and swim perpendicularly to it – maybe not the direction we wish to go, but the direction that ensures our survival. We can start again where we left off once we have safely escaped the rip.
What is the solution? Can we create an effective absorbing layer to contain this multi-dimensional attack of our own creation? Can we engineer a solution? Impedance matching is difficult even for the most basic wave equations. How do we avoid reflections? Some energy will always seep through our boundaries. Should we start our own wave? There is a high risk that our own wave will collect mud as it travels and be unrecognisable the next time it passes through us.
WHEn the wave OF hate reaches the shore
I have been directly targeted by university-educated instigators of online hate within a workplace. Even in this context, instigators seem to have have no qualms about making bold and easily refuted false statements on topics they know almost nothing about. A message similar to the following was sent to me on a company chat channel, visible to all employees of the company:
“Hey @anarchic, I happen to think second-wave feminism doesn’t belong in this industry. I also know that a number of other staff agree with me.”
The context of the message is very important. He sent it immediately after people on the channel started celebrating an announcement I had just made – my winning of a popular vote for my idea to build a sociological modelling framework. There was no prize, or formal public recognition, but I was invited to attend an innovation day. I was so excited. It was the highlightof my career. The emotional impact of that toxic message at such a happy moment, was profound. I was totally unprepared for an attack of that nature in a professional environment – in front of all my colleagues.
Over the previous months, I had made many posts celebrating women in engineering on the company intranet. It had taken over 20 years to find my voice and build my courage, especially because I am usually the only woman on the team. Most of my male colleagues welcomed my insights – especially those with daughters. Strangely, my attacker never commented on those posts.
INSTIGATORS TARGET YOUR HEART
The other observation I made is that the misogynist did not target my idea at all. He made no comment about its technical or scientific merit. Instead, he aimed at my driving passion – my ideological belief that women should share equal human rights with men. Attacking a person’s fundamental belief system is a tactic I have often seen used by online trolls when they attempt to derail the achievements of others as quickly as possible, to stifle participation and innovation by underrepresented or disempowered groups.
INSTIGATORS SCHEDULE THEIR ATTACKS STRATEGICALLY
The man chose to launch his online attack on my ideological and political beliefs at the very moment I achieved a small degree of success and external recognition for a technical idea. The timing is no coincidence. Similar incidents have been a regular occurrence throughout my career but became more frequent once I gained status as a senior engineer in leadership. I have even been threatened with physical violence – once because I successfully improved the computational efficiency of a simulation algorithm using a well-known mathematical approach. It was an approach that the perpetrator had never heard of and did not understand. I was simply doing my job.
INSTIGATORS CREATE AN ILLUSION OF MASS SUPPORT
Like many propagators of online hate, the man’s message implies that he has supporters. Perhaps he aimed to make me feel alone – a strange tactic, considering I am quite used to being alone as the only female engineer on teams. Interestingly, nobody in the company “liked” his comment. At first, I thought this was a good sign, but I later discovered that his small number of supporters lacked the courage to make their sexist opinions public and preferred to confront me in private.
INSTIGATORS SELECT THEIR WORDS STRATEGICALLY TO GAIN SUPPORTERS
So why was my male colleague so aggressively opposed to second-wave feminism? The second wave was from the 1960s to the early 1980s – my mother’s generation of feminists. One of the biggest achievements of the second wave in Australia was the equal pay legislation of 1969. From his message, we can deduce that he wants the industry to revert to laws from over 50 years ago. Imagine if his message had read:
“Hey! I happen to think women in our industry should not be paid equally. I also know that a number of other staff agree with me.”
“Hey! I happen to think women in our industry should not share the same human rights as men. I also know that a number of other staff agree with me.”
Statements like that would have gone down like a lead balloon for most people. Trolls are usually very careful with their selection of words. For example, the words “second-wave feminism” are more likely to provoke reactions from other misogynists than the words “gender equality”. In my opinion, his selection of the words suggests he has been heavily influenced by articles and social media posts by Men’s Rights Activists. His subsequent messages on the chat channel supports my theory. Like a typical social media troll, he attempted to project an image of me as a militant, man-hating feminist, rather than as a senior engineer with a PhD and expertise in modelling and simulation, presenting an innovative idea about leveraging existing technologies for the benefit of humanity.
INSTIGATORS SHaMELESSLY ADVERTise THEIR OWN IGNORANCE
Of course, there is another possibility for the instigator’s bizarre focus on second-wave feminism. Perhaps the man is completely ignorant about the history of feminism. Perhaps he thinks we are only in the second wave of feminism now. The silly sausage does have a lot to catch up on, doesn’t he? – over forty years of progress in women’s rights!
INSTIGATORS ARE UNABLE TO OFFER CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM
Imagine my joy, if instead of trolling me, the misogynist had provided constructive feedback on my actual idea. Perhaps he might have written,
“Hey! I happen to think that the underlying libraries from which you plan to leverage your framework, cannot handle dynamic two-way interaction between the agent models and the social wavefield. I also know that a number of staff agree with me that it would be better to simplify the architecture by having the agents only respond to an existing wavefield, rather than influence it – at least in the first iteration.”
But I am dreaming. That will never happen. I have noticed a common tactic used by extremely aggressive misogynists. They often accuse their target of being “unable to accept constructive criticism” or of “taking criticism personally.” They usually make this accusation in front of others. When I ask them to repeat their original criticism in front of others, they usually refuse to do so. When I repeat what they said word-for-word, and then challenge them to explain how their criticism was constructive, they are always stunned into silence. Suddenly they are flushed out into the open. Their toxic misogynistic ideology is in full view of others.
INSTIGATORS PRACTICE DARVO TO GAIN SUPPORTERS
In subsequent online messages, the instigator even followed the typical perpetrator tactic of DARVO (Deny Attack Reverse Victim and Offender). He indulged in self-victimisation and portrayed himself as the target of an attack – by me!
INSTIGATORS FEAR DROWNING WHEN YOU SUCCEED
The man seems to have panicked when he realised that he didn’t understand the technicalities of my idea. Instead of asking for clarification, his gave in to his irrational fear and hatred of women who know more than him. (It was not the first time he had become enraged by my higher education level.) He thrashed about mindlessly as he sank, and tried to force me under the water, so he could stand on my head to gasp for air. I am sure he is not as stupid as his spluttering of nonsense suggests.
MODELLING THE CUMULATIVE EFFECTS OF MICROAGGRESSIONS
Ironically, my original idea that triggered the online attack mentioned above, was about understanding the mechanisms of structural violence. This gives the instigator’s misogynistic message a recursive and self-referential aspect. He had demonstrated exactly the sorts of behaviours I was intent on capturing for a modelling and simulation scenario about the attrition rate of senior female engineers. I wanted to model the cumulative effects of a lifetime of microaggressions and overt misogynistic aggression that regularly occur when women and girls innovate. He had unwittingly provided me with research material.
HATE ESCALATES WHEN THOSE IN POWER CONDONE IT
Unfortunately, leadership condoned the man’s online attack and refused to remove the messages. The floodgates were opened, and over the next few months I endured several incidents of face-to-face psychological violence and physically intimidating gestures, like finger-jabbing at my face and men shouting at me, because of my feminist ideology. It was frightening. To top it off, leadership responded soon after I made a formal complaint by offering me a sham contract and pressuring me to resign from my permanent position. Of course, I refused to sign the contract.
I took a few days’ personal leave to recover from the mild psychological injury caused by these events. Soon after I returned to work, the boss fired me. Perhaps it was not the intent of the original instigator of the message to destroy my career, but it is an example of how even a low level of online hate rapidly spreads and has a “real world” impact on the targets. The situation escalates and becomes even more dangerous when people with the legal responsibility and authority to stop it, choose instead to condone it.
How to SURvive a RIP TIDE
I believe we all have the power to stop online hate – if we work together. Despite the trauma of these experiences, my love of engineering has given me the determination to continue in my chosen profession. It has taken a few years to find my crowd, but I have finally joined men and women who actively support equal opportunity and innovation and inclusion. I am no longer treading water in an ocean of hate, watching the flotsam and jetsam float past me. I am fully aware that the waves will capture anything I say, because we are all part of it, but now, I am not alone. When I hold up a hand to signal for help, my allies pull me up onto the deck of a strong ship.
take ACTiON
So please, if you see a wave of online hate approaching, please take a stance. Refuse to become a source. Refuse to allow the hate to propagate. If you are able to afford it, please make a donation to the Online Hate Prevention Institute by following the link below.