#heartmob

HeartMob’s Volunteers Crack the Trollish Eggs of Twitter

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Julie Lalonde is aware of all too effectively what it’s wish to be harassed on social media.

Lalonde is an Ottawa-based ladies’s rights activist intimately aware of the deluge of abuse a single tweet can set off. She’s endured the whole lot from whack-a-mole trolls impersonating her on-line to enduring a coordinated marketing campaign of abuse in opposition to ladies who dared to touch…

Social media is our town square of today: It’s where we share opinions, news, and ideas. But rampant harassment and intimidation keeps many women from participating fully in those conversations. A 2014 study showed that although 40 percent of internet users face online harassment, harassment is particularly severe for young women: One in four young women have been stalked online.

For 10 years, the group Hollaback has been working to end street harassment. Now, they’ve launched a new website that takes aim at digital harassment. Hollaback spent two years developing Heartmob, a private platform to assist people who are facing online harassment. Heartmob was funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign and a Knight Foundation grant.

“It came out of frustration,” says Hollaback co-founder and executive director Emily May. “I was seeing all of my feminist friends leaving the internet because they were being harassed. They’re ending their work because it’s not safe for them to be online anymore.” Heartmob is a “community coming together to end violence,” says Mays.

I really don’t like talking about social justice, and I certainly have never written a post myself relating to the subject, but let’s git er dun, boi.

In case you haven’t heard, a site called HeartMob recently opened, which aims to “save the Internet.” How does it try to accomplish this, you ask? By attempting to provide support for people who have been victims of online harassment.

This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but their promo video certainly raises a few questions.

First of all, anyone who has been on Facebook (the social network the person in the video is apparently using) for more than a year can tell you that harassment to that sort of degree is almost nonexistent. Can anyone tell me why a group of people would explicitly target someone on a social network which requires you to use your full name? I’ve never even seen someone commenting on someone’s selfie with something like “you’re ugly” or “please stop taking pictures of yourself”. The worst case of online harassment I’ve ever witnessed is the case of Zamii, which ironically happened on Tumblr.

Second, if you listen to the guy talking who’s supposed to be harassing her, he says “I know where you live.” If someone is making threats against you, IRL or online, and you feel that the threats are legitimate (and that you have a good sense of the culture of the site you are on, someone on /pol/ saying that they’re going to kill every LGBT person they meet is obviously bluffing), then you should definitely seek help from the police, and report the person to the admin of whatever site they made the threat on. But on HeartMob, even though you can include “Threats” in the case of harassment, what’s the point? What are the staff at HeartMob going to do about it? Are they going to politely ask the perpetrator to stop? Your first stop for reporting threats of violence should be the police, not HeartMob.

Lastly, it seems that HeartMob is the very definition of a hugbox. That meaning, someone says something mean to you, you put up a post about it, and people that know nothing about you say things like “Don’t worry, you’re awesome!” It just seems so empty, what else would they say on a site meant for positvity? They know absolutely nothing about what you look like, your interests, your friends, or your personality. And while I don’t think that people you only know online are incapable of cheering you up, I wouldn’t want my first interaction with someone to be “Don’t worry you’re beautiful.” If you’re feeling down and want some support, I feel that it’s a lot better to get support from someone you have a relationship with, either IRL or online.