In the last few months I’ve been approached by two different producers working on two separate documentaries that focus on online harassment of individual creators, both of whom were seeking my input. And in both cases I hesitated, considerably, before agreeing to go forward and share my experiences through interviews. What I want to be clear about is that, for the most part, I have an unbelievably supportive online community that sends only love and appreciation, and in reality, perhaps twice I year I deal with a legitimate safety threat that involves the police. I do not want to be branded or otherwise known as “that Field Museum YouTube science girl who gets harassed online a lot,” because that simply isn’t the truth.
In the context of other YouTube creators and female or minority science communicators, I’m under the impression that a low threat rate such as mine is fairly astounding: I’m a lucky one. I don’t have people sending me offensive gifs on twitter every day, spamming my inbox with pornography, sending rape threats to my tumblr accounts and on my YouTube videos. From my experience talking with other creators, they don’t have it as nice. But it’s a horn I try to not toot too much, because, y’know, the more I proudly proclaim the integrity of this following, the more at risk I feel for opening the floodgates for people to swoop in and try to start breaking me down, widely publishing my personal information online, or waiting to confront me outside of my workplace. So agreeing to go public and share my largely positive experiences, in a way, feels like a gamble to invite more of that senseless and condescending action into my life.
But I’m doing it because it’s not about me. It really isn’t. It’s about the people, mostly women, who contact me every week about someone who has stalked them because of their presence online…even if it’s a small, almost nonexistent presence… like, someone saw them on a train platform, asked their name, looked them up on Facebook and now won’t stop sending them uncomfortable messages. My interviews are for those people who we have promised to commute with so they feel safer than when forced to walk home alone. For those people who message me because they had someone stalk them at work but their employers won’t take them seriously enough to ensure their safety. It’s because we’ve still got this mentality that, somehow, people who publish their work or life online have ‘asked for it’ because they attained some minor semblance of a digital audience, and that somehow equates ‘attention seeking’ to a misinformed and evolving idea that ‘this person is needy and therefore doesn’t deserve personal barriers.’ It perpetuates the idea that the threats need to come with the job description because of the position’s seemingly intangible rewards of popularity. Standing on that train platform, engaging with another person, you must have been seeking attention. It’s your fault for having a Facebook page, a YouTube presence, an easy-to-find twitter account.. and we’ll give you no resources to help resolve your sudden problem.
As we enter 2016, it’s evident now more than ever that transparent digital presences are going to be a pivotal way in which companies and individuals engage with families and friend groups, growing audiences, and a wider public. And it’s about time that we reconsider the flippancy of how many employers and law enforcement offices approach these positions and situations. I’m going public about my experiences because I find it novel that my employers take my personal safety so seriously – but many other people in far less public situations can say the same. And I also want to let it be known that it is possible to have a public life online not wrought with harassment and negativity, but one that is supportive and relatively innocuous. I want to help redefine what it means to be a spokesperson, a representative, an activist, without those titles bearing as much unnecessary negative burden.
So, this is all just to say, endlessly, thank you for being awesome people who uphold me and my mission to communicate scientific discoveries with a wide populous… and for not making me feel like I need to be harassed and threatened in the process. Many of my counterparts do, and are, and I want to help better the future for all of us.