Last week, actress and comedian Leslie Jones faced a brutal cyber attack in which hackers took over her website and posted racist imagery, pictures of Jones’s driver’s license, passport and nude photos. The site went dark shortly after the attack. The culprits behind the hack are still unknown, though the incident is now under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security.
The hacking of her website is only the latest addition to the flood of hatred and threats Jones has received online. Just a few weeks ago she took a brief hiatus from Twitter after receiving countless hateful tweets full of racist and sexually explicit material. The vicious campaign against Jones was led by right-wing blogger Milo Yiannopoulos who bombarded his 388,000 followers with cruel tweets about Jones’s intelligence, character and physical appearance. The hate directed toward Jones by Yiannopoulos and others was so great it began to trend on Twitter.
The controversy sparked discussions about cyberbullying, freedom of speech versus hate speech and what role social media platforms ought to play in regulating content. Executives at Twitter initially hesitated to shut down Yiannopoulos’s account out of respect for free speech. Eventually, though, they permanently banned the blogger from Twitter, citing rules that “prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.” Some Twitter users were upset by the decision, either because they felt it limited users’ freedom of speech or because they were frustrated that Jones’s attackers were kicked off the site while plenty of lesser-known Twitter users face online harassment every day.
While it is important to talk about how we regulate free speech on the web, what happened to Jones on Twitter and on her website points to an issue larger than online harassment. With regard to why Jones has been such a target, one professor who has long studied cyberbullying explained, “Cyber aggressors target people who are different because they want to reinforce norms of heterosexuality, gender, race, etc.” Between her roles in the “Ghostbusters” reboot and on Saturday Night Live, Jones is ruling the world of comedy right now, and she happens to be doing it while being black and female — a success story America’s bigots cannot stand. Jones’s struggle is one symptom of an ongoing problem in the United States: the urge to respond to that which makes us uncomfortable by tearing it down or hiding it out of sight. If this attitude sounds familiar, that might be because one of our major presidential candidates has suggested deporting every Muslim in America and building a wall on the Mexican border.
What happened to Jones is an issue of online hacking and Twitter regulations, but it is also a result of the hate mongering that has become an everyday occurrence in this country. Any American who does not fit every single norm — race, gender, sexuality and so on — is at risk for the same treatment. As the Internet has become a valuable tool for people of every background to have a voice, it has also become a tool for those who would rather silence those voices. Consider Anita Sarkeesian, the web designer whose push for more female representation in video games spurred a flood of online hate, including death and rape threats. And the hatred is not limited to the big names we see in the news. In response to what happened to Leslie Jones, many Twitter users came forward to say that kind of harassment is commonplace. According to one user, “Black people (especially black women) on Twitter have been the target of racist abuse on Twitter for at least the last six years.”
As social media and other online interactions grow and take on a larger role in everyday life, the implications of what happens in our online world become more important. We cannot write off online hate speech as a few cruel tweets to be ignored. They are an indication of a larger problem. Even if you have never used Twitter — even if you have never heard of Leslie Jones — her cyberbullying is your problem and mine, too. Educate yourself on her story and on the thousands of stories of racism, sexism and general discrimination that take place in the cyber world every day. Jones is but the latest of example of how ours is not a country where it is safe to be different, not even in a virtual sphere. And that should scare you.
Nora Walls is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. She may be reached at h.walls@cavalierdaily.com.
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