This article is a preview of the May magazine ‘TintaLibre’:
Maite Taboada woke up one morning and learned that the interview she had given in previous days to a Spanish newspaper had already been published. No one from her family notified her, nor did any of her professional colleagues. The notifications came in the form of insults on Twitter, now called X, and in the comments to the article in question. “Charo linguist”, “it is clear that you do not have to be intelligent to be a professor”, “censoring sectarian”, “poor devil, the judges of the Holy Inquisition had a better pass because at the end of the day they knew what they were doing while this He only knows how to repeat like a parrot what he hears at home” and his favorite: “He has a constipated face.”
“Notice that it was an article in which I precisely stated that comments on social networks and in the media tend to be personal attacks and hate, well there you have the example,” he says from Vancouver, where he has lived for years and where She works as a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Simon Fraser University and is a member of the Royal Society of Canada.
In that same interview he spoke of the need not to confuse freedom of expression with freedom to offend and presented a debate still pending to be addressed in depth: can offenses and their consequences for those who receive them be considered an occupational health problem?
Ángela Rodríguez Pam was appointed Secretary of State for Equality and Against Gender Violence in October 2021 and held the position until July 2023. She can write one or several books about what she has received through social networks. “The hatred I have received from the ‘machosphere’ for being a woman and a feminist has been savage. “It influenced, of course, everything related to my physical appearance,” she says. Sometimes she received the ‘niceties’ after some of her statements or for something related to her political activity. But many others were enough with her mere presence on networks from the first hour of the day. “Have you had breakfast yet? “I sent you a box of donuts to the ministry,” she told him.
“My capacity for public representation, if you think about it, was very small. But the focus was on everything that Irene (Montero, former Minister of Equality) and I did,” she clarifies. Rodríguez’s voice sounds tired, far from that energy that she gave off as Secretary of State. She remembers that trip to New York with the leadership of the ministry, where Spain was going to be examined on equality policies at the headquarters of the United Nations. “While they were giving us extraordinary marks as a country, on social networks we were being called brats, we were described as beach bars. We didn’t understand anything,” she says.
Let’s talk about another woman, this time a fictional character. The scene in which Anna Scott, played by Julia Roberts, protagonist of the film Notting Hill (1999), discovers a photo of him in jar on the front page of a British tabloid newspaper and says: “What’s wrong with men with nudity? Seriously, especially with breasts. How can they be so interested? They are just breasts, half of the world’s population has them (…) they are for breastfeeding, your mother has them… you have seen thousands of them. Why so much trouble?”
Because in this article the question that one asks, paraphrasing Roberts, is: What happens to men with women on social networks? Why so much fury? Why so much hate? What bothers them? What is expected of them? Since when did ‘Charo’ stop being the title of a beautiful song by Quique González and become an insult?
That hate and lackadaisical style are common ingredients in responses directed at women may be something that one intuits, that one has experienced, but the data insists on proving those who support that statement right. Because they are the perfect target for the professional hater and the beginner.
The British newspaper The Guardian He did an exercise that proves it. In the ten years from 2006 to 2016 he analyzed the more than 70 million comments left on the articles in his digital edition. And the conclusions were, and are, revealing of the times we live in: of the ten authors who received the most insults, eight are women (four white and four non-white) and the two men are black. Two of the women and one of the men are homosexual and of the eight women, one is Muslim and one is Jewish. In addition, articles written by women had more blocked comments in almost all sections, especially sports and technology. Because we already know that depending on which parties we are not invited.
Of the ten most insulted authors over a decade in The Guardian, eight are women (four white and four non-white) and two men are black.
Let’s go to May 2023. Less than a year ago, the Mapfre Foundation and the University of Deusto presented a report that concluded that women are more vulnerable to negative comments on social networks than men. In that same study, it was shown that insults and coercion cause more insecurity in them (22% in women and 8% in men), fear (6% and 1%), eating problems (10% and 2%) and problems of sleep (15% and 9%), as well as sadness (22% and 11%) and nervousness (25% and 12%) on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, the most used social networks and where the most negative comments are made and they receive.
“Years ago we talked about criticizing women for opinions different from ours, but things have gotten worse. Now it is not enough to give an opinion, it is enough to be there. Women cannot participate and it is something that has permeated to lower levels. Younger women also suffer from it, regardless of their sign of power,” explains Taboada, who as a computational linguist analyzes the origin and context of hoaxes, misinformation and the fury almost always directed towards them.
Something to which he gives so much importance – “a man from Albacete may be insulting influenced by a campaign that we don’t even know about” – that it helps him detect flaws in the democratic system itself. “The people who are attacked the most on the Internet end up withdrawing from public life, and it should be the other way around. You can be kicked out of a bar for that type of behavior, but the same does not happen on a platform. What do they call it censorship? It’s not true, but go somewhere else,” he says.
He gives as an example France Bélisle, the mayor of Gatineau (Quebec), who resigned in February of this year, unable to continue in such a hostile political climate in which she received death threats. An appearance in which she asked herself what price must be paid for practicing politics – almost 800 elected officials at the municipal level have resigned since the 2021 elections – and from which she left without answering questions.
“Hate is an organized thing, not random,” says Rodríguez Pam. A feeling that does not stay on the networks and that sometimes transfers to real life. “I had a police escort, they have even spit on me in the street and I resist changing neighborhoods,” she adds. This harassment has its consequences, on your mental health and your relationship with social networks. Every morning, since she left the Government of Spain, she glances at X while drinking coffee and occasionally checks Telegram on his computer. She doesn’t want more. He can’t take it anymore.
It is very expensive to be in politics, he insists. With the difficulty for many of having a network that supports them. Or that you have a network and that, depending on the day, it is insufficient. “I have collected death threats, and sometimes I have responded in a humorous or hesitant manner. “That throws them off,” she says.
How disconcerting was the response from Andrea Levy, who was the delegate of Culture, Tourism and Sports at the Madrid City Council. One Sunday morning, while she was making a video of herself on Instagram with her cultural recommendations of the week, she received a response that had little to do with the content, but with the color of her hair. “The roots of your hair, Levy!” they told her. Something to which she responded immediately: “You talk about culture, but the typical zascandil always has to appear when talking about your physique. Let’s see, I’ll tell you clearly: I’m free to go HOW I WANT and no one has asked your opinion.”
But Rodríguez Pam is not the only one who has distanced herself from an increasingly hostile digital environment. The comedian Henar Álvarez recently told the newspaper The country: “I removed myself from Twitter and now I only use it to spread my work. Let’s see, I criticize a lot, I give my opinion on everything, and I love to gossip about others, but with my friends in bars or in private. Since I know how bad it is when you suddenly get a barrage of shit on the networks, it’s been a while since I wrote anything personal on them.” The journalist Cristina Fallarás, shortly after, in the same newspaper: “There should not be any women on Twitter, they should all come out en masse. “You cannot, you should not share a space where violence against women is common.”
It is about making them small, that their opinion does not matter, that they do not show themselves. Anonymous women, of any age. The social media system determined to invalidate us.
This is also demonstrated by a report prepared by the Women’s Institute on harassment online towards young women. He reveals that they, knowing that they feel more judged than them, react by not answering the messages they receive, because they perceive that any type of response would trigger a greater response from the haters. So they choose to change their behavior: they restrict access to their profiles, they stop interacting with strangers, they control the content they share… the padlock as an answer.
Something that women with fame and popularity do not escape. Tell it to the now Madrid resident Amber Heard, actress and ex-wife of actor Johnny Depp. During her divorce proceedings and the trial held in 2022, the excessive attacks that Heard received and the fierce defense of Depp’s positions caught the attention of investigative journalist Alexi Mostrous. He told in a podcast titled ‘Who trolled Amber?’ the existence of an army of Saudi bots behind a campaign of ridicule and hatred towards her, determined to present her as an evil and manipulative woman seeking revenge and him as her victim.
But in his investigation he also discovered how hundreds of praises for the Saudi regime headed by Mohammed bin Salman had been launched and then deleted from those bots. And he connected the dots. Jeanne du Barry y Modi, two of Depp’s latest film projects, had received Saudi financing. The magazine article Vanity Fair published in February of this year about the friendship between the prince and the actor ended up confirming his work.
It’s about ridiculing us. That we shut up and get tired of being there. “Those who don’t say it hurts them, deep down what they don’t want is to show their weakness, their vulnerability. Because it affects self-esteem, impostor syndrome always emerges,” says Rodríguez Pam.
Meanwhile, Maite Taboada tries to put herself in the shoes of the aggressor. “I have a lot of empathy for the kids. incel (from English and is the acronym for involuntary celibate), because I believe that machismo also harms men a lot. “It makes them deeply unhappy,” he says. These young people are united by a feeling of anger and rejection towards women: those they blame, those they hate, those they do not love. Or yes, but with a padlock.