Twitter troll apologises to Mary Beard after threat to tell his mum about online abuse

[FairPhyllis]

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/10209643/Internet-troll-who-abused-Mary-Beard-apologises-after-threat-to-tell-his-mother.html

For the record, it was not Mary who threatened to tell on him to Mummy, but another user after Mary retweeted his abuse. He swiftly apologised. He is 20 btw.

I think Mary's strategy of 'retweet and shame' is pretty good. However I am thoroughly depressed by all aspects of this - that it happened, that a man thought he could do this for the lolz, that he clearly has a mental distinction between the women you can abuse and the women you respect (his mother). I hope his mother bloody does know by now.

How can you even begin to combat the misogyny that the internet reveals is out there? I feel as though any man I know could have all this seething misogyny hidden from me. I bet Oliver Rawlings' mother didn't know he was such a nasty little piece of work.

The cynical side of me says that the average twitter user is so stupid that identifying them will not be a problem for you. Remember this woman who advertised the fact that she had knocked a cyclist over with her car?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-23324422

However, if you were a cyclist yourself, would you be afraid of every woman car driver because of what this woman did? I guess not.

I know people get wound up by trolls, but if you turn it on it's head, social media actually seems to be a very good way of 'outing' idiots and undesirables. Would you rather know what people were really like, or have it hidden from you?

I know what you mean OP. It just seems that so many men are abusive to women that it makes me wonder what is inside all men I see now. So many of them appear to be absolutely off their rocker and filled with anger.

Where does a 20yr old student get the idea that this abuse is 'fun' from?

I don't genuinely believe that he 'hates' women... he is obviously deeply embarassed at the idea of his mum knowing what he wrote.. so why did he think it was 'funny' when he was annonymous? Where does this 'game' of annonymous abuse come from?

I am finding all of this disturbing and baffling in equal measure. Why bother doing this? I really can't understand the motivation.

He apologised on twitter but them posted on Facebook saying he'd been taken out of context and that a limit of 140 characters meant that he wasn't able to y want he really wanted to say. Can't help wondering what an extra 140 characters might have resulted in.

I would rather people kept their disgusting abusive thoughts to themselves rather than to inflict them on others or to find other equally repulsive people to gang up with. Twitter encourages this type of behaviour where there would be little encouragement or opportunity to do it in real life.

What a nob.

Whenever I read about young men like this, I am reminded of all the "Calm down dears, the generation of men who were misogynists are all dying out now, you're all equal now and young men all think women are equal".

Right.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23488550

An article from the beeb on why people troll on twitter.

I suppose the one good thing about the levels of misogyny that the internet reveals is that it should now be plainly obvious to everybody what we're up against .

And at least when future employers google this little shit they will find all of today's articles about him, decide he is a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen and not employ him.

OK. I've had it. I've decided that from now on, unless men actively and consistently speak up against this sort of crap, they do not get the benefit of the doubt from me re whether they are sexist fuckwits or not .

Mary Beard rocks.

Newsnight has just had an interesting discussion on this issue. It really struck me how horrified the male journalists covering the story about rape threats being sent to a feminist campaigner were when they saw the stuff that women online often have to put up with as routine.

Yes, that was quite telling, I thought.

Indeed. Paul Mason - Newnight's economics correspondent and one of those tracking down the trolls said he does get abuse about economics, mainly, but what he saw today had shown him what women put up with all the time.

I suppose it's like everything else to do with harassment, sexism, misogyny etc. women can say it happens until we are blue in the face but it isn't until men see it for themselves that they actually believe what we are saying

I am also shocked that people seem to think that anonymity (or not in this instance) gives them an opportunity to abuse people, the number of people who do this is shocking. I had naively thought that it would improve for my daughters generation, I'm sad that that is not the case. On the other side though, it was a man who exposed him and male celebrities are speaking out about the abuse that Caroline Criado-Perez received. I know that the majority of men that I know would never ever abuse someone in this way. I hope that it starts a trend to change what is thought of as acceptable over the internet, facebook, twitter etc.

I applaud Mary Beard and others like her who have the courage and determination to take these people on.

Generally speaking, the minority shout the loudest.

It's similar to youtube comments, you'd think the majority of people are racist.

I hope the authorities and the public are now realising that threats of rape and sexual violence, and the barrage of sexist abuse women suffer routinely online, are serious issues that must be tackled.

It's not just 'people are ruder online than they would be IRL' nor 'don't make a fuss about it, just hide or block'. Misogyny must be taken just as seriously as racism or homophobia - and that applies equally to prejudice against disabled people, which is also neglected/tolerated compared to racism.

Agree with edam. It's about misogyny, not "don't feed the trolls". I'm glad, in a way. It shows we are not just making up the existence of misogyny in our culture because we are hysterical. When normal men see it (as per the Newsnight piece which I thought was really strong actually) they are shocked at what we deal with. Similarly, if normal men knew that sexual assault was something every woman can expect to deal with at some point in her life, they would take it more seriously. But I don't think they do really know.

As for the BBC piece, I thought it interesting that the piece set abuse of women alongside abuse of people with disabilities - in this case people with autism. Yes the latter is a real problem. But it neatly puts misogyny in a "minority issues" box. It's hard to express this frustration well but one of the things that happens to feminist campaigns is that they get put in a diversity box and to me, it's not about diversity. It's about a deepseated hatred of women.

I would suggest that there is no widespread deep-seated hatred of women within society. Only psychopaths have such feelings, and there aren't many of them. If such a widespread hatred existed, our society would look very different.

I think CiscoKid, it's so deepseated, most people don't even know it's there.

There was a depressing piece in the Times this week, by Matthew Syed, who's usually quite intelligent, arguing that we should stop being so anti-men because civilisation was created by Alpha Male's creative genius. Pause to be amazed that anyone thinks our male-run society is anti-male. It was so ill-thought out I could hardly believe it. But at the heart of it was the belief that women didn't leap up and invent the electric light bulb because they don't have Alpha Man's creative spark. No awareness at all that women have been effectively enslaved for millennia - through lack of access to education, to property rights, to the workplace - and through lack of ability to control their own fertility.

Now that women have some of these rights, they are emerging onto the public stage - and lots of men really don't like it. The Twitter trolls are the least of it. What concerns me more are the casual assumptions about women that are made literally all the time. The ownership of our bodies, the refusal to allow us to be publicly clever and not beautiful, the sexual assault that almost every single woman will face in a lifetime. And the casual representation of the idea that women can't do the stuff that men can do. In a thinking person's newspaper. In 2013.

"it's so deepseated, most people don't even know it's there"

The young guy who tweeted at Mary beard didn't even know it was there. This is the problem. People come out with this shit without even realising that what they are being is deeply misogynistic and then when they are challenged they still can't accept that this is what they are being. They tell women to 'just ignore it' like it doesn't matter. It is SO deeply ingrained.

... and - these aren;t trolls. they are 'normal' people who let stuff slip out that is vile and disgusting as if they don't even realise it is. That's the problem!

How would you define hatred within a society? Not at an individual level, but at a societal one. Because without going all Godwin on this discussion, there are examples of societies in human history where hatred and persecution have run unchecked by Governments or the law.

I am not excusing personal abuse on twitter, but I want to address it in the correct terms. Persecuted, hated groups do not have recourse to the police and the justice system. Just because somebody does something, it does not mean that that action is acceptable to society. Hence we have arrests, prosecution and sentencing, where appropriate.

"Persecuted, hated groups do not have recourse to the police and the justice system"

There is a looong history of women being victim to the police and justice system. Just as the policeforce is (was!) institutionally racist it is also institutionally misogynistic.

There are several stories of where police forces have let down women, continue to let victims of sexual assault, rape, domestic violence down.