Reporters vs. trolls: Journalists have new resources to combat online harassment

Reporters tormented by online harassment have some new resources.

A discussion at the National Press Club on Friday explored the problem as three reporters talked with three people who study the issue.

Reporter Jonathan Weisman of The New York Times outlined a 2016 incident when his tweet excerpting someone else's column on fascism brought a response addressing him as "(((Weisman)))," a way that anti-Semites mark the name of someone they think is Jewish.

Weisman said the exchange soon produced "an absolute avalanche of anti-Semitic hate that just flowed through my Twitter (and) eventually spilled into emails and voicemails."

Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery covered the aftermath of the fatal shooting of a black teen by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

"What we saw almost immediately were attempts to attack and intimidate reporters from covering the story," he said. "Every time you opened your phone, there were thousands and thousands of messages," including fabricated accusations and some that published a reporter's home address or made death threats.

Such trolling can be especially frightening for women, said Soraya Chemaly, director of the Women's Media Center Speech Project.

"If you are writing from a specifically feminist perspective, you're in a target zone. And if you're writing about sexualized violence, you are specifically in a very violent target zone," she said.

She said she has received "rape threats, some death threats, some lynching threats."

Julia Ioffe of The Atlantic said that as a reporter in Russia, she was attacked by Kremlin-sponsored "troll armies" that overwhelmed the content section of her stories with profane sexual remarks targeting her Jewish faith and saying she couldn't understand Russians -- although she was born there and fled with her family to the United States 28 years ago to escape persecution.

In 2016, Ioffe wrote a GQ profile of Melania Trump that brought a denunciation from the first lady on Facebook. It also prompted "organized and viciously anti-Semitic rhetoric," attacks photoshopping her face onto a photo taken at the Auschwitz concentration camp and circulation of personal information about her relatives.

Michelle Ferrier, an associate professor of journalism at Ohio University, left her job as a lifestyle columnist in Florida when hate mail accumulated, targeting her African American race with comments about war against black people and lynching. She started a project called "Stop Hate" to investigate attacks on journalists. She learned, she said, that the hate mail is a tactic "by white supremacist groups designed to create fear and intimidation, and to force people out of the profession, offline and shut them up."

The panelists see social media doing too little to stop hate speech on their platforms. Where tech executives cite their users' right to free expression, the reporters and activists want stronger enforcement of the sites' terms of service, rules that generally prohibit invasion of privacy, harassment, threats and other abusive behavior.

A new publication from PEN America, the organization that works to protect writers' freedom of expression and safety, is a collection of strategies and resources. The resources can be found in the Online Harassment Field Manual.

Ferrier's TrollBusters organization has produced "Online Pest Control for Journalists" a set of a dozen cards intended to be a guide in moments of online crisis.