On March 9, 2021, Fox News host Tucker Carlson took aim at a favorite target: a New York Times journalist. In the crosshairs was tech reporter Taylor

Gender-based online violence spikes after prominent media attacks

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2022-01-27 17:00:12

On March 9, 2021, Fox News host Tucker Carlson took aim at a favorite target: a New York Times journalist. In the crosshairs was tech reporter Taylor Lorenz, one of the paper’s rising stars who had recently described the toll of online harassment. The torrent of online hate she receives had “destroyed her life” she said, in a tweet supporting the launch of the Online Violence Response Hub.

“Destroyed her life, really? By most people’s standards, Taylor Lorenz would seem to have a pretty good life, one of the best lives in the country, in fact,” Carlson intoned. “Lots of people are suffering right now, but no one is suffering quite as much as Taylor Lorenz is suffering.”

After Carlson mocked Lorenz in his segment, her social media mentions and inbox were again filled with violent threats and harassment—a dynamic likely familiar to many women with a public presence online. The vitriol Lorenz endured was an example of gender-based online violence, which UNESCO recently characterized as online rhetoric against women designed to “induce fear, silence, and retreat; and … chill their active participation” in public debate. Yet as problematic as the phenomenon is, it remains relatively understudied. To better understand how gender-based online violence takes place, we therefore examined three instances in which female journalists were attacked by prominent male media figures on either social media or broadcast media, and then tracked the ways in which online violence against them spiked.

In order to analyze the relationship between attacks by prominent media figures and the quality of online discussion, we—NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and the International Women’s Media Foundation—collected data on three case studies: Carlson’s targeting of Taylor Lorenz above, the journalist Glenn Greenwald’s targeting of Lorenz on Twitter, and Carlson’s targeting of Virginia Heffernan in a separate segment on Fox News.

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