Professor Silvio Waisboard writes in 2020:
* Fresno Bee educational reporter Mackenzie Mays became the target of online trolling after she published stories on sex education and teen pregnancy in local schools in early 2018. In one story, she reported that Brooke Ashjian, board president of the Fresno School District, made derogatory comments about LGBT “lifestyle,” and that he had settled a defamation suit prompted by his remarks. The story sparked much criticism and demands for Ashijan to resign. In response, Ashijan insulted Mays on Twitter and local radio, and doxed her on social media. Immediately after, Mays and her family were the targets of trolling filled with lies and threats. She feared for her physical safety and her family’s. Concerned about threats, she became wary when covering events and opening emails. Eventually, managing editor Joe Kieta took her off the education beat and assigned her to do investigative stories. Mays was the subject of fresh attacks after she reported
about drug use and prostitution in a boat cruise sponsored by a winery partly owned by Republican Representative Devin Nunes. Nunes disparaged Mays in his 38-page diatribe against The Fresno Bee, a mailer sent to his constituents (Nunes also filed a defamation suit against the newspaper). Trolls targeted Mays online and by voicemails (Baron 2018). In January 2019, Mays quitted the Bee to join Politico’s California bureau, and received an award from the National Press Club for her work.
This example is just one among scores of recent cases of trolling against journalists in the United States and around the world. Globally, reporters continue to face a constant barrage of online attacks (Costa-Kostritsky 2019). Trolls generally abuse journalists through email and social media messaging. It disproportionately targets female (Koirala 2020; Martin 2018; Mong 2019; Rego 2018; Westcott 2019), non-white reporters (Gardiner 2018), as well as journalists identified with religious minorities (Crary 2018). According to a study by the International Women’s Media Foundation, online harassment has become the main safety concern for female journalists (Ferrier 2018). Anecdotal evidence and personal testimonies describe a host of negative consequences of online intimidation (Elks 2018; Reporters without Borders 2018; Thielman 2020; Wolfe 2019). Journalists fear that covering certain people and subjects might attract trolls, and they report cases of self-censorship and personal trauma. They are generally reluctant to disclose and cover attacks out of fear of enraging trolls as well as the potential “Streisand effect” of amplifying incidents.
The consequences of online harassment have been particularly damaging in cases of doxing (the malicious publication of private information) and swatting (coordinated prank calls to emergency services to deploy the police to a certain address). Washington Post columnist Vargas’s (2018) observation that trolling has become “one of the worst parts of the job” captures a widespread sentiment in contemporary newsrooms (Miller and Lewis 2020).
While I recognize that trolling is an ambiguous, fuzzy concept, here I understand it as a range of malicious behaviors that aim to cause trouble, fear, and concern through aggressive and threatening language (Coles and West 2016; Phillips and Milner 2018). Trolls taunt, demean, scare, intimidate, and harm others. Trolling represents a range of disturbing trends in the digital society, such as intolerant speech, hate, and the erosion of personal privacy. Forty percent of the United States population has experienced online harassment (Pew Center 2017), especially young adults and women, through social
media, online games, comments section and email. Trolling has become a global threat to human rights (Amnesty International 2018).
* The twofold push to make newsrooms more accessible to the public through various forms of “audience engagement” (Steensen, Ferrer-Conill, and Peters 2020) and to raise the visibility of journalists and their work in social media and legacy platforms has made journalists frequent targets of trolling.
* Frequent exposure on social media and legacy media turns journalists into salient examples of contemporary “known citizens” (Igo 2018), whose thoughts and lives can be tracked with relative ease by many actors – governments, corporations, and citizens. With more publicity comes higher risk of surveillance, invasion of privacy, and defamation. Like other public people, journalists are more prone to be targets of vicious attacks simply because they are prominent and easy to identify and contact. Personal and professional reputation is constantly on display and at risk for people like journalists for whom visibility is intrinsic to their jobs. In the porous, dynamic structured of mediated visibility in digital societies, reputation is a fluid, volatile good (Rosamond 2019). Just as they can display their work and ideas publicly, journalists are also more likely to be scrutinized by publics motivated by various reasons – accountability, curiosity, or spectacle. Furthermore, heightened visibility also facilitates digital vigilantism (Trottier 2017). Digital vigilantism refers to toxic actions such as harassment, naming and shaming, and doxing by citizens who want to retaliate against others.
