“How did that make you feel?” I wasn’t going to be cruel, but I wasn’t going to let him off easy either.
“Not good,” he said. “I mean, I felt horrible almost immediately afterwards. You tweeted something along the lines of, ‘Good job today, society,’ or something along those lines. It just wouldn’t—for the first time, it wouldn’t leave my mind. Usually, I would put out all of this Internet hate, and oftentimes I would just forget about it. This one would not leave me. It would not leave me. I started thinking about you because I know you had read it. And I’m thinking how would she feel. And the next day I wrote you.”
“Yeah,” I whispered, “I mean, have you lost anyone? Can you imagine? Can you imagine?”
“I can. I can. I don’t know what else to say except that I’m sorry.”
He sounded defeated. I believed him. I didn’t mean to forgive him, but I did.
“Well, you know,” I said, “I get abuse all day every day. It’s part of my job. And this was the meanest thing anyone’s ever done to me. I mean, it was really fresh. He had just died. But you’re also the only troll who’s ever apologized. Not just to me, I’ve never heard of this happening before. I mean, I don’t know anyone who’s ever gotten an apology. And I just—I mean, thank you.”
“I’m glad that you have some solace.” He seemed surprised, and relieved, that I hadn’t been more cruel. But I was just tired. I didn’t have much anger left. We exchanged a few pleasantries, I thanked him, he thanked me, and we hung up.
It felt really easy, comfortable even, to talk to my troll. I liked him, and I didn’t know what to do with that.
It’s frightening to discover that he’s so normal. He has female coworkers who enjoy his company. He has a real, human girlfriend who loves him. They have no idea that he used to go online and traumatize women for fun. How can both of those people share the same brain?
Trolls live among us. I’ve gotten anonymous comments from people saying they met me at a movie theater and I was a bitch. Or they served me at a restaurant and my boobs aren’t as big as they look in pictures. Or they sat next to me at a bar five years ago and here is a list of every single bite of food I consumed. People say it doesn’t matter what happens on the Internet, that it’s not real life. But thanks to Internet trolls, I’m perpetually reminded that the boundary between the civilized world and our worst selves is just an illusion.
Trolls still waste my time and tax my mental health on a daily basis, but honestly, I don’t wish them any pain. Their pain is what got us here in the first place.
If what he said is true, that he just needed to find some meaning in his life, then what a heartbreaking diagnosis for all of the people who are still at it. I can’t give purpose and fulfillment to millions of anonymous strangers, but I can remember not to lose sight of their humanity the way that they lost sight of mine.
Humans can be reached. I have proof.
This story isn’t prescriptive. It doesn’t mean that anyone is obliged to forgive people who abuse them, or even that I plan on being cordial and compassionate to every teenage boy who pipes up to call me a blue whale.* But, for me, it’s changed the timbre of my online interactions—with, for instance, the guy who responded to my radio story by calling my dad a “faggot.” That guy does not have a good life. Since this conversation with my troll aired on This American Life, I’ve had to report six more Twitter accounts using my father’s name and face, one that scolded me for writing about my abortion. “Why did you kill my grandchild?” it asked. It got easier every time.
It’s hard to feel hurt or frightened when you’re flooded with pity. It’s hard to be cold or cruel when you remember it’s hard to be a person.
Abortion Is Normal, It’s Okay to Be Fat, and Women Don’t Have to Be Nice to You
Just two weeks after my This American Life segment aired, copies of a leaked memo by Twitter’s then-CEO Dick Costolo began flooding into my inbox from breathless friends. An employee had posted my piece on an internal forum, where it got the attention of Twitter higher-ups, Costolo himself ultimately responding with this blistering communiqué: “I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO,” he wrote. “It’s absurd. There’s no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front.”
Then: “We’re going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them. Everybody on the leadership team knows this is vital.”
“We’ve sucked at it for years,” Costolo went on. “We’re going to fix it.”
I was floored. Like, literally on the floor, rolling around. Bloggers, activists, and academics had been throwing ourselves against Twitter’s opaque interface for years—begging for help, compiling sheaves of data on online abuse, writing heartfelt personal essays and dry clinical analyses—and suddenly, in one stroke, we had their ear. There was a human being behind the bird, and he actually gave a shit.
The jury’s still out on the long-term efficacy of Twitter’s “fixes.” It’s notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to retroactively change a community once bad behavior has taken root—once users know how to exploit a system, it’s hard to evict them without rebuilding the system itself from scratch. Still, to know that Twitter is aware and they’re trying—to have the CEO publicly throw his hat in with the feminazis rather than the trolls—is a victory, and a sign that our culture is slowly heaving its bulk in the right direction.
Decisive victories are rare in the culture wars, and the fact that I can count three in my relatively short career—three tangible cultural shifts to which I was lucky enough to contribute—is what keeps me in this job. There’s Costolo and the trolls, of course. Then, rape jokes. Comedians are more cautious now, whether they like it or not, while only the most credulous fool or contrarian liar would argue that comedy has no misogyny problem. “Hello, I Am Fat” chipped away at the notion that you can “help” fat people by mocking and shaming us. We talk about fatness differently now than we did five years ago—fat people are no longer safe targets—and I hope I did my part.
All of those changes are small, but they tell us something big: Our world isn’t fixed, the way those currently in charge would have you believe. It’s malleable.
When I was a little girl, I was obsessed with a video-game developer named Roberta Williams. She made point-and-click adventure games—King’s Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory—a largely extinct genre in which exploration, curiosity, and problem solving took precedence over combat and reflexes. As a corny king or a dopey spaceman, you wandered through brilliant, interactive landscapes, picking up random shit in the hope that it might help you rescue a pissed-off gnome from a swarm of bees, or break a talking collie out of dog prison so he’ll reward you with the magic kerchief you need to blindfold the King of the Dead.
I wanted to be Roberta Williams; I wanted to build worlds.