Men reading ‘mean tweets’ shows brutality of online abuse

The trend of reading “mean tweets” has become a regular segment on some late night talk shows and for online videos, usually in the form of celebrities reading out mean things said about themselves, or people reading mean YouTube comments for the purpose of comedy. But while there can be laughs found in the outrageousness of online rhetoric, a video by the podcast Not Just Sports in conjunction with two female sportswriters, shows that the online harassment of women frequently slides into death threats, threats of sexual violence, and horrific abuse.

Abusing people online removes face to face interaction, so what happens when people have to read such abuse to women in person? In the video, two female sportswriters, Sarah Spain of ESPN and Julie DiCaro of The Cauldron and 670 the Score, sit opposite men (not the authors of the tweets) who are asked to read the abusive messages to their faces. It starts off harmlessly enough - if the baseline for harmless commentary online is still mean abuse - but then slides into something far more shocking.

“One of the players should beat you to death with their hockey stick like the whore you are,” is one tweet, “This is why we don’t hire any females unless we need our c*** sucked or our food cooked,” is another. “I don’t think I can even say that,” one of the men says, as the video progresses to more vile and violent messages, including sexually abusive and violent threats, such as the hope from one person that one of the women “is Bill Cosby’s next victim”, and “I hope your boyfriend beats you.”

As the readers grimace and shake their heads, evermore reluctant to read out the violent and threatening tweets, such as, “I hope you get raped again,” the message is clear: when empathy comes into play, when we can actually see the expressions on people’s faces who are being abused online, it’s far harder to confront than by merely tapping away on a phone from a distance or sitting at a laptop. “I’m having trouble looking at you when I’m saying these things,” one of the men says.

As the video wraps up, a message reads, “Some women in sports are harassed online just for doing their jobs. We wouldn’t say it to their faces. So let’s not type it,” with the hashtag #morethanmean.

The conversation around the abuse that women - particularly female journalists, bloggers and broadcasters - have to put up with online is amplifying. This video shows the brutality of that abuse. The real question remains, though: how do we stop it?