It cost a school-shooting victim the safety of home.
It cost an athlete the joy of a victory.
It cost the family of a gay teen a battle with their community.
In 2018, online hate spiraled into an unavoidable force in American life. A staggering wave of threats, bigotry and rage came out of the dark and onto the apps and websites we use every day. It transformed the Internet’s great power to connect into a weapon.
The Washington Post spoke with people across the country who endured these cruel, often anonymous attacks. The angry messages and mean-spirited memes were seemingly everywhere, but these seven stories are about the part most observers never see: the human experience at the other end.
Hateful content has for years corroded the Internet’s standing as a place for conversation and community. But only in 2018 did the largest Internet companies begin to measure and disclose how toxic it could be — and how little of the damage they’d truly addressed. Facebook removed nearly
3 million pieces of hate speech between July and September, a 15 percent increase from the start of the year — and admitted how much it fails to detect. In September alone, YouTube removed 25,000 videos that broke its rules against harassment, cyberbullying, and “hateful or abusive” content.
Viciousness is emboldened by the anonymity, or at least the distance, offered by the Internet. It spreads through online services where the most outrageous post often gets the most attention. It flourishes in a polarized climate where stating a political opinion makes anyone open to personal attack.
The online hate presaged some of the year’s most disturbing and deadly attacks, including the mass mailings of homemade bombs to critics of President Trump. Before the fatal shootings at a Pittsburgh synagogue that marked the worst anti-Semitic assault in U.S. history, suspect Robert Bowers
used his account on social network Gab
to link to YouTube videos of neo-Nazi propaganda, clips depicting black people as violent thugs and videos calling Jewish people “satanic.” The growth in online hate also paralleled what the FBI is calling a
multiyear rise in reported hate crimes nationwide.
But the broader impact of online hatred was more subtle and widespread, etching scars into people’s psyches that could last longer than the attacks themselves. Many victims did not want to go public about the experience, for fear of opening themselves up to even more online wrath — or real-world attacks.
The stories of those who could talk about it revealed a haunting truth of life on the modern Web: The online hatred a stranger dashed off in seconds could linger for years.
The viral fury may have subsided, and the Internet may have moved on to some new and distant outrage. But the hidden damage left behind was not always so easy to forget.
[Skipping the stories of the other literally whos]
Rachel McKinnon, 36, track cyclist
Rachel McKinnon was proud. She’d won a major championship in a track-cycling race in October, breaking a world record and accomplishing a feat for which she’d been training for years. She’d also become the first transgender woman to ever win it. She celebrated by
posting a photo of herself on Twitter, beaming from the podium.
She’d expected some hatred: At work, online and in her sport, she had routinely endured anxiety and trauma over the decade since her transition began. Then her tweet went viral. Suddenly, an online army of people she’d never met was criticizing everything that had made her who she was.
The sheer volume of it was stunning and disappointing. Thousands of hateful comments — saying she cheated, she didn’t belong or worse — poured in during what should have been one of the happiest times in her life.
“After a certain point, it becomes a blur,” says McKinnon, a college philosophy professor in Charleston, S.C. “The negative messages outweighed the positive by about 3,000 to 1.”
In the past, she’d changed her phone number, worried someone would publish it as part of a harassment campaign. But she began to change even more. She asked a friend to monitor her Twitter account. She turned off her phone notifications. She stopped taking photos around her home, for fear they might give clues to her address.
She had reached a new peak in her athletic identity, but she couldn’t stop hiding herself away: going back through her online history to make things private; cultivating online block lists; pulling personal details off her résumé. At race events, she needed to have videos and headphones “to tune out the world.”
She is still proud: “I have a jersey and a medal that can’t be taken away,” she says. But she is also tired and overwhelmed. On Facebook, she took her name — Rachel McKinnon, world champion — and changed it to something else.
— Drew Harwell
