This week, Governor General Mary Simon released some of the horrible online correspondence that she says recently led her office to turn off commenting on her social media accounts. It was the basic sort of garbage you would expect from the cowardly, mostly anonymous online hordes who get off on abusing public figures, especially women, and in Simon’s case with a healthy dose of anti-Indigenous bile mixed in.
Some of it, though, was just garden-variety invective. Simon’s Instagram post about the harassment begins with the following: “This is going to sound rude … but when is that b–ch Mary Simon going to start doing her job?” It was a curious inclusion for a call to “foster change” and to “encourage safe digital spaces for all women.” No one is ever going to make the internet safe from comments like that … except by turning off comments. Some of us need to wake up to that reality.
The occasion for Simon’s intervention was International Women’s Day. But the topic of online abuse has also been amplified in recent days by unfortunate layoffs at Global News. Among the journalists cut loose was reporter Rachel Gilmore, who has also been a major target for cowardly, mostly anonymous online hordes — particularly those who assemble under the Freedom Convoy umbrella.
Gilmore’s coverage of and commentary on the Ottawa protest was uncomplimentary, to say the least, but it was hardly unique in that respect. Gilmore has never been shy about publicizing the abuse she receives, and it’s something we should all look at and consider. But it does have the unfortunate and predictable effect of encouraging more abuse. Now that she’s out of a job — presumably the victim of a collective bargaining agreement that privileges seniority — her self-styled tormentors seem to have ramped up the vitriol even further. That’s as predictable as it is depressing.
It’s the same misanthropic spirit that animated the cowardly, mostly anonymous attacks on Simon. And again, it’s good that the targets share their experiences with us. There is a crap-ton of vitriol in my inbox almost every morning, but it rarely assumes the “how dare you even exist?” tone that my female colleagues often have to deal with. Those are real people with real wives and families composing everything from C-word-laden harangues to outright physical threats. Not every keyboard cretin is a real-life threat, thank goodness, but it would be naive to simply assume that none of them are.
The question of what to do about it is where I part ways with many of my colleagues in media, who seem genuinely to believe government in general, or the police in particular, should be trying to shut down this unpleasant online ecosystem. Gilmore is among several female journalists who have documented their unsatisfying interactions with police forces, which tend to yawn at anything short of a transparent physical threat. Several news organizations have joined the call for Canadian officialdom to do … something.
It’s hardly even worth discussing whether government should be trying to fix this. The simple fact is, government would fail if it tried. The police, meanwhile, fairly routinely fail to stop real-world, offline stalkers from victimizing intimate partners — these are people whose names and addresses and circumstances they know perfectly well. The notion that they would succeed in hunting down anonymous Twitter trolls who might be halfway around the world is even more fanciful than the notion they would bother trying.
Simon has the right social media approach — the only one that’s going to work: If you can’t stand the comments to your social media posts, then turn commenting off. You can still “speak about the repercussions of harmful discourse,” and “push back against those who would denigrate women for their contributions,” as Simon advocated in a statement. But nor, as Simon put it, do you have to effectively “offer a platform” for horrible people to say horrible things.
Disengage. It’s a tough ask for journalists in particular — especially those on the job market and keen to remain in the public eye. But there is no better option, and there never will be.
Disengagement is an unfair, incomplete solution. It won’t stop the harassing or threatening emails, for example. But if anyone’s going to stop those, again, it almost certainly won’t be the police. Every time I see a senior media executive’s signature on a call for the cops to take threats against journalists more seriously, I wonder what that executive has done in-house to boost security — online and off — for their journalists. Almost certainly, that’s where any real-life tragedy waiting to happen will — we hope — be averted.
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