Give me data, not condolences

I’m extremely grateful to ⁦the Brookings Institute for doing this careful analysis of the sexualized online attacks and death threats that ⁦Taylor Lorenz and I got after Tucker Carlson attacked us on his show. I can’t explain how much data is preferable to condolences when this happens.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate good words. It’s that my suffering — or non-suffering — isn’t the issue. The issue is the crime: the quantity, defamation, death and rape threats, and relentlessness of these campaigns. When it’s happening to you, it’s hard to make the campaign visible to others, though it’s like being in nonstop digital crossfire.

But this data from Brookings is like having cold, irrefutable photographs of the crossfire. It’s no longer deniable by Carlson, et al.

I provided my former employer, the L.A. Times, with data visualizations after this happened. But my chief boss didn’t discuss it as a campaign. Instead he said he disagreed with the column that “provoked it.” Then I was let go a few months later.

It seemed like such a good time for the newspaper to stand by its female journalists and stand with @pressfreedom and @TheCAOV. But no. Instead of seeing this as a campaign to chill speech, this one boss saw this as a problem with me and my column. So the campaign worked.

And they WORK because they don’t get documented, and even our bosses can’t see them as campaigns but simply female misfortune. So even with good intentions they end up rehashing whatever you wrote to see if you “deserved” it. I hope the Brookings Institute will continue to produce the data that exposes the mechanics of these violent, defamatory, speech-chilling, and career-ruining campaigns.