manduhthings-blog

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Online Harassment of Women in The Form of Trolls

Women have been victims of harassment for decades, but the rise of social media has allowed for even more harassment in the form of comments, messages and other online interactions. As mentioned in the video discussion “Stop the trolls: Women fight online harassment”, the underlying problem of harassment online is the dehumanization and depersonalization that exists in the online world. People who are active online are communicating and interacting with other users on a broad scale and this becomes problematic when interactions become pestering, threatening or even violent. Harassment within social media sites is quite common -- more than it should be. About four-in-ten Americans have been involved with online harassment in 2017. Keeping this number in mind, “women are about twice as likely as men to say they have been targeted as a result of their gender”, according to a Pew Research Study. The numbers are alarming, and we must remember that we are interacting with real human beings online, even if we can’t see them. 

[manduhthings-blog]

Communities have always been a large part of social interactions with one another, even before the invention of the internet. Lindsay Blackwell talks on the importance of smaller groups on these platforms in order to form a sense of community online with like-minded individuals. Whether these groups are sectioned off by race, gender or political views, these social connections are valuable in the real world. 

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This graph illustrates that social media and politics are becoming so intertwined that it’s even affecting relationships within the sites/apps. 

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For scores of social and racial groups, Twitter is a unifying space—a place where culture is created and tweaked, news is spread and debated, and political movements are hatched.

https://www.wired.com/story/latinx-twitter/

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This article talks about the role that Twitter plays in politics. The read discusses that Twitter may be influencing users in a corrupt way due to the unequal number of people who are democrat or republican using the app. A few factors that distorts users’ views on candidates running for 2020 election: the amount of jokes about candidates, memes about the election and the unequal representation of different races and political stances on Twitter.