Gendertrolling

Characteristics:

1. Gendertrolling attacks are precipitated by women voicing their opinions online.

- Women who voice women’s rights, supporting other women, or simply for their race and ethnicity are targeted.

2. They feature graphic sexualized and gender based insults.

3. They include rape and death threats, often credible ones, and frequently involve real life targeting, which adds to the credibility of the threats.

- Threats include language that are intended to scare, intimidate, upset, or worry the targeted groups.

- “Doxxing”, which means that their personal information (home address, home phone number, social security, or other personal identity), heightens rape and death threats because the extensive research that the troller went through to post the information shows the commitment of the troller.

4. They cross multiple social media or online platforms.

5. They occur at unusually high levels of intensity and frequency (numerous messages or threats per day or even per house).

6. They are perpetuated for an unusual duration (months or even years).

7. They involve many attackers in a concerted and often coordinated campaign.

- Shortly after being “doxxed”, the individual can start receiving phone calls from numbers they do not recognize which adds to the many attackers characteristic.

History:

Distinction from generic trolling: “Trolling” arose in the 1990s, from internet studies scholar Whitney Phillips, as “disrupting a conversation or an entire community by posting incendiary statements or stupid questions on a discussion board… for [the troll’s] own amusement, or because he or she was a genuinely quarrelsome, abrasive personality.” Their motive is to arouse a strong reaction from their chosen targets. Phillip describes that most trolls are “white, male, and somewhat privileged.” While generic trolling is done more to arouse reaction out of the intended target audience, gendertrolling does not only this but also expresses beliefs held by these trolls.

See “Characteristics” of specific features of gendertrolling. One of the differences between generic trolling and gendertrolling is that gendertrolling “systemically targets women to prevent them from fully occupying public spaces.” (Mantilla, 569)

Examples:

Responses:

Solutions: