Jill Filipovic is a journalist, attorney, columnist for CNN and formerly a political reporter for Cosmopolitan. As an outspoken feminist woman she is often targeted for abuse and threats by what we generally refer to as Internet “trolls,” mostly men who compensate for their lack of social skills, personal empathy and emotional maturity by crudely insulting, or in some cases, terrorizing women and girls on the Internet.
For trolls, receiving “likes” or “recs,” to their insults or jabs is a constant source of tiny jolts of dopamine, stimulating their pleasure centers in ways they imagine the elusive sex they crave might one day as well, so they keep doing it. It’s an evanescent form of “popularity” for many emotionally stunted males who in “real life” may not be very popular. And its an outlet for their anger at that fact.
Of course, there is a fine line between trolling and outright terrorism. CNN’s reporters and their families are now receiving death threats from Trump supporters following the implicit suggestion last week by this President that reporters be physically attacked for printing stories unfavorable to Trump. It’s often difficult to separate what we call trolls--who tend to retreat from their bravado when revealed in the light of day--from the truly violent and evil, a distinction whose murkiness actually feeds the trolls’ desire to provoke a reaction from their targets.
We can thank Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs for their ability to intrude into our lives, but trolls are really just a symptom, even a window into the human condition laid bare, without the filters of civility that humans have found necessary to clothe their naked emotions in order to survive socially. As a female media personage, Filipovic, like thousands of women, has learned that trolls are simply part of the landscape to navigate:
For women who write on the Internet, the existence of these kinds of trolls isn't new. It would get boring to recount all the harassment I've received from anonymous men on the Internet, but suffice it to say there are few creatively misogynist insults (and many more pathetically uncreative ones, usually starting with the letters B or C or involving obscene demands) that haven't been hurled my way.
And some of the more unbalanced specimens she’s had to deal with have shown up in real life to try to realize their fantasies--or act out their hostilities. Filipovic has had to call Law Enforcement on a few rare occasions to show these people the difference between behaving badly online and behaving badly in person.
So you’d think that someone like Filipovic would be well within her rights to hate these people. You’d think that she’d be so fed up she’d be railing against them, about their actions, filled with righteous indignation. The trolls sure wish she would act that way—that would be a big win for them.
But that’s not what she thinks--the real danger is not the trolls, she writes, but the people who read them and quietly nod in agreement. And she draws a parallel between her own experience as a woman having to cope with trolls to the country’s experience in dealing with Donald Trump and the malevolence of an Administration that seems increasingly troll-like in its desire to lash out and target Americans it deems “unworthy,” or who simply stand in the way of its goals:
I don't feel sorry for trolls; they have made my life miserable enough to remove any sympathy on my part. But when I think about what their lives probably look like -- they seem to be not particularly bright nor particularly likable nor particularly busy with interesting or meaningful endeavors, but who knows? -- it gets a little easier to worry less about who they are.
The bigger worry is who's reading them, and who's allowing their toxic ideas to drip into the mainstream….now, it appears that one way or another,
content from the fetid cesspools of hate and violent fantasies about harming Jews, Muslims, African-Americans, women and members of the news media is finding its way into the Trump team's consciousness —
as was also apparently
the case during the presidential race.
***
Trolls, more than anything, want attention. They want to provoke disgust, outrage and sometimes fear. Of course they mean it. The President's team, and Trump himself, have shown they live in their ranks. They mean it, too.
Filipovic knows that the misogynist trolls who harass and threaten her can get away with it because there are multitudes of men that agree with them, that find their actions funny and may even envy them. These are the same outwardly genial men she sees at the grocery store, on the train, at the office, in a multitude of social situations. The same ones who politely open doors, who smile and say hello, who interact with her on a daily basis:
The truth is a scarier thing to admit: For every troll who has emailed me a rape threat or tweeted at me to tell me I'm a bitch who should die or posted one of my articles on an Internet message with attendant comments about my weight or his efforts to figure out where I live or his detailed description of the many different ways he would like to see me physically violated, there are other men reading, nodding along, maybe laughing. Men who date women, are married to women, ride the subway every day, work in an office and engage in polite water cooler chat, sit next to you in math class, wave to you over the fence. Men we think are "normal."
And that’s what's most disturbing about the Trump phenomenon. It’s not really about Trump—he’s just one sick, twisted man. It’s the everyday folks, your “friends” and neighbors down the street, nodding in agreement and approval when he points the finger at journalists and says “attack.” Or laughing when he Tweets about a woman’s “bloody face lift.” Or pursing their lips in smug agreement when he threatens to cut off health care for millions of the “undeserving” out of sheer spite, or smiling in self-satisfaction while he rails against immigrants as “rapists” and “murderers.” Or those who simply stay quiet, going about their business and willfully seeing nothing, kind of like those Poles who used to live in the towns around the concentration camps.
They are the audience, the ones who enable the Troll to continue his behavior. They are the crowds that roar in approval when he retreats to his base after experiencing some setback to his agenda, or just the ones who say nothing while he proceeds to savage and degrade the country’s institutions. And, in some ways, that makes them even more corrosive and destructive to this country than he is.
The most profound revelation of the 2016 election may not turn out be the elevation of Donald Trump to the Presidency, but the revelation that so many “normal" Americans were willing to stand by and nod in approval at his heinous actions.