Two weeks before Cesar Sayoc allegedly began sending pipe bombs to Democrats and their supporters, he seems to have threatened political commentator Rochelle Ritchie on Twitter.
On October 11, Ms. Ritchie appeared on Fox News to criticize musician Kanye West for visiting Donald Trump in the White House. Mr. Sayoc – whose infamous van was plastered with pro-Trump stickers and defaced images of Democrats – seems not to have liked it.
“Hug your loved ones real close each time you leave home,” he allegedly wrote to Ms. Ritchie on Twitter, suggesting she’d soon disappear into the swampy wetlands in Florida, where Mr. Sayoc lived.
Ms. Ritchie considered the statement a death threat, and reported it to the social media company. On Oct. 26, after Mr. Sayoc was arrested for allegedly sending bombs to over a dozen people, she posted an image of the reply that she received.
“Thank you for your complaint. We have found there was no violation of the Twitter Rules against abusive behaviour,” it said.
It’s a pathetic response, but not a surprising one. Women have long known that misogyny is intertwined with other prejudices and violent tendencies – and it has long been ignored until someone else gets hurt.
I’m not surprised, for example, that another man arrested last week, Gregory A. Bush, has a history of domestic violence: Time magazine estimates that’s true of 33 per cent of the men who committed public mass shootings between 2009 and 2017.
Mr. Bush’s previous convictions prohibited him from having a gun, but he got one anyway, then allegedly killed two African-Americans in a Kentucky grocery store after failing to enter a black church.
And while sexist social media histories aren’t as damning as criminal records, they’re too common to be ignored.
Before killing 10 people in the Toronto van attack this past spring, Alek Minassian made a Facebook post labelling himself an “involuntary celibate,” a term for men who blame women for their lack of sexual activity.
And Robert Bowers, charged with killing 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, was a regular on the gleefully toxic social media site Gab, where he is reported to have posted sexist messages along with anti-Semitic ones.
Online abuse has long spilled into women’s offline lives. Look at what happened to pop culture critic Anita Sarkeesian in 2013, after she released a YouTube series about how age-old gender stereotypes play out in modern video games. The furious result included rape threats, death threats, endless social media harassment and a “response” game, in which players got to beat her up. Years later, when we were on a panel together at a conference, she was accompanied by two security guards. For all I know, she still employs them.
More recently, black actor Leslie Jones and fat acceptance activist and writer Lindy West both left Twitter temporarily or permanently due to unrelenting abuse. So, too, have legions of women not famous enough to be named.
Twitter acknowledged failing Ms. Ritchie, but platforms have to move beyond deleting malicious anonymous accounts, or removing content that is clearly, overtly harmful.
There are further steps to consider, said Chloe Colliver, a research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in the U.K., which advises governments and organizations on how to tackle extremism and radicalization.
Ms. Colliver said via e-mail that the next step is for tech companies to acknowledge the snarled nature of hate, that “troll-like behaviours, for example, might signal violent activity against women as well as extremist attacks on politicians or minorities online.”
Again, the examples are plentiful: white supremacist Richard Spencer, who is regularly repulsive on Twitter, has recently been accused of serial violence by his estranged wife.
Paying attention to early signals of future action is one way law enforcement already works to prevent child sexual exploitation, said Ms. Colliver.
“Technology has been used to help spot cases in which it looks like young users are being preyed upon by predatory older individuals online,” she wrote. “Certain patterns of messaging behaviour have begun to be used as signals indicating potential risk.”
That doesn’t mean arresting every troll, or destroying the idea of “free speech” – though let’s note that those being silenced by fear (or death) also have the right to have their speech protected. It does require taking the abuse of women seriously.
Imagine the lives that could have been saved if we’d done so long ago.