Online Harassment

The Mask Is the Message

PUBLISHED 7/7/2026 by

Most of us have seen the photograph by now.

I keep coming back to the masks.

Masks have always carried meaning. A surgeon wears one to protect a patient. Someone recovering from an illness wears one to protect themselves and others. A firefighter wears one to survive long enough to save someone else.

But when someone covers their face while intimidating another person, threatening a community, or committing a crime, the purpose isn’t protection. It’s concealment. It’s a way of saying: I want to do this, but I don’t want anyone to know it was me. That’s why Patriot Front marches with their faces covered.

Federal immigration agents carrying out arrests in public places wear face coverings for the same reasons: They create anonymity. They make accountability harder. They allow participants to disappear back into ordinary life once the march is over. They make denial easier.

I’ve participated in protests and marches over the years alongside hundreds—sometimes thousands—of people. Not one of us wore a mask. We stood behind our words and convictions. We accepted that our names belonged with our beliefs.

Peace Without Women? Ongoing Peace Talks and War Negotiations Keep Leaving Women Behind

PUBLISHED 6/25/2026 by

As negotiations over conflicts across the Middle East continue, one pattern remains stubbornly familiar: women are largely absent from the room. From Gaza to Iran, women are bearing the costs of conflict, repression, displacement and economic collapse even as negotiations over security, governance, reconstruction and political transition move forward without their meaningful participation.

This exclusion has consequences far beyond representation. Decisions about who governs, who receives aid, who returns home and who is protected shape whether societies emerge from conflict more secure or more fragile. When women are kept outside these processes, transitions risk reinforcing the inequalities and grievances that helped drive conflict in the first place.

To the Men Who Send Women Hate Mail

PUBLISHED 5/15/2026 by

I am not alone in receiving unsolicited emails—especially as a professor, public writer and thinker, and woman who dares to speak her mind. Often, the emails are thoughtful, engaging and sometimes deeply moving expressions of gratitude that warm the heart. However, from time to time, there are the crude, crass and obtuse intruders, thrusting insults and even threats into our inboxes. These expressions of masculine fragility and anger—whether intended to or not—chill the receiver’s speech and cause women to silence themselves.  

Here, then, is my response to Mr. Sawyer—but also, in many ways, a response to the countless men who insert themselves into women’s inboxes with condescension, hostility and misplaced certainty. Women in public life know these messages well: the unsolicited lectures, the attempts at intimidation, the casual cruelty masquerading as critique. Consider this every woman’s letter to the crass and crude male intruder in her inbox. I hope you enjoy.

Five Things Decision-Makers Still Don’t Understand About Digital Violence and Young People

PUBLISHED 4/27/2026 by

In the course of their lifetime, 840 million women will be subjected to physical or sexual violence – nearly one in every three women in the world, according to a new United Nations report. And if that sounds like a number you’ve heard before, it might be because despite decades of advocacy, awareness raising and lobbying for legal and policy changes, this figure has barely changed in the last 20 years.

UNFPA has been at the global forefront of identifying and addressing technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and is preparing to release new research into the disproportionate harm this abuse inflicts on adolescent girls. 

One report shows how digital violence affects women and girls at every age, starting as young as early childhood. Yet UNFPA-supported research, forthcoming from partner Save the Children, also highlights that adults often underestimate the dangers facing adolescents.

Netflix Documentary ‘Inside the Manosphere’ Exposes a Digital Pipeline to Misogyny

PUBLISHED 3/22/2026 by

On March 11, Netflix released Inside the Manosphere, a new documentary by Louis Theroux that hit the No. 1 spot on Netflix. It is an uncomfortable but necessary examination of how the manoverse—a loose conglomeration of men’s rights and red pill influencers, podcasters and politicians—exploits and harms young boys and teenagers.

At the heart of the documentary is a profound inequity in the influencer space between the experiences and expectations of men and women. While the male content creators are eager to proclaim traditional values, they exalt “one-sided monogamy,” where they expect women to remain loyal to them (“my wife doesn’t talk to any men”) while they have multiple partners. While they shame women who do sex work on OnlyFans, one of the influencers, Harrison Sullivan, funds an OnlyFans creator house. His excuses—that it’s just business, that he would never allow his own daughter to do OnlyFans—attempts to create distance and deniability between him and his commercial choices and consequences. 

A majority of the influencers Theroux speaks to seem to be aware of the harm they cause. Sullivan even warns Theroux that young teenage boys should not be watching their content, and blames the parents that would allow their children to consume this content. Several seconds later, we see the influencer taking photos with young fans.

What’s worse is witnessing how damaging the manosphere rhetoric is to men.

When content creator Justin Waller meets up with two of his fans on the street, one of them shares, “He’s one of my greatest role models,” and when asked what he has learned from Waller and others’ content says, “Life as a man, you’re born without value. We have to build that value.” Waller jumps in and says that women are born with value because of their beauty but “nobody’s gonna invite him on a trip to Miami. … He has to be valuable to other men.”

How devastating that these men are raised not just to accept, but to thank, influencers and content creators that tell them they are born without inherent value. 

In Serbia, Women Journalists Say Death Threats Have Become Routine

PUBLISHED 2/12/2026 by

In 2019, Jovana Gligorijević wrote a damning profile of a Serbian influencer who had connections to political power players and alleged criminal networks. 

Gligorijević works at Vreme, an independent news magazine founded in 1990 by intellectuals and activists fighting state censorship. Aside from her political reportage, she’s covered stories on sexual violence and, specifically, how Serbia’s judiciary treats rape victims. She notes wryly that in her experience, “when you report on politics and human rights, sooner or later you come across the far right as the root cause of the problem.” 

Other independent women journalists like Gligorijević that are critical of the Serbian government face sexual insults, threats of lawsuits, surveillance, smear campaigns and online rage.

Sundance 2026: Documentary ‘Silenced’ Exposes How Defamation Suits Muzzle Survivors and Journalists

PUBLISHED 2/6/2026 by

Featuring the cases of Amber Heard, Gisèle Pelicot, Brittany Higgins, Colombian journalists at Volcánicas and others, Silenced traces a global pattern of defamation suits used to punish survivors and the reporters who amplify their stories.

It’s a fitting but frustrating coda that Silenced itself faced legal threats right after its festival premiere.

(This is one in a series of film reviews from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, focused on films by women, trans or nonbinary directors that tell compelling stories about the lives of women and girls.)

Raped, Recorded, Shared—Then Abandoned by the System: ‘Once It’s on the Internet, It’s Out There’

PUBLISHED 2/3/2026 by and

Survivors of online sexual exploitation and abuse are not just confronting individual perpetrators—they are up against systems that were never designed to protect them.

A new report by Equality Now and the Sexual Violence Prevention Association documents how survivors who report tech-facilitated sexual abuse routinely encounter jurisdictional dead ends, outdated laws and opaque platform policies that leave harmful material circulating indefinitely. For many, the abuse does not end with the assault itself, but continues through repeated viewing, sharing and threats—often with devastating financial, professional and psychological consequences.

The report also makes clear that this harm is not inevitable. Survivors point to concrete policy solutions that could meaningfully change outcomes: consent-based laws governing the online distribution of sexual material, clear and enforceable takedown obligations for tech companies, survivor-centered reporting systems and access to free legal and mental health support.

Accountability is possible, but only if lawmakers and platforms choose to act.

Musk Isn’t Stopping Grok From Creating Explicit Photos of Minors Using AI. Here’s What Can Be Done.

PUBLISHED 1/12/2026 by

Since the end of December, X’s artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, has responded to many users’ requests to undress real people by turning photos of the people into sexually explicit material. After people began using the feature, the social platform company faced global scrutiny for enabling users to generate nonconsensual sexually explicit depictions of real people.

The Grok account has posted thousands of “nudified” and sexually suggestive images per hour. Even more disturbing, Grok has generated sexualized images and sexually explicit material of minors.

X’s response: Blame the platform’s users, not us.

‘This Is the Blind Spot in Extremism Research’: Cynthia Miller-Idriss on Misogyny, Gender and Violence

PUBLISHED 12/5/2025 by | UPDATED 1/23/2026 at 10:45 A.M. PT

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, director of the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University, makes the connection between gender policing, misogyny and far-right extremist violence, which for many years was not a connection scholars were willing to make.

Jackson Katz and Miller-Idriss discuss her book, Man Up, on misogyny, gendered violence, the MAGA movement and far-right extremism. Miller-Idriss says political violence coming from the far-right includes gender policing and exploitation.

“These aren’t just opportunistic elements of extremism—they are deliberate, organized and large-scale forms of gendered violence aimed at increasing pain and humiliation of victims, witnesses and family members. … I’m still blown away by how few people will acknowledge the connection.”