Goldie Taylor, Cyber Threats, and Silence
Recently, journalist and cable news pundit Goldie Taylor was the latest person to come under attack, at the receiving end of some pretty nasty threats from a prolifically racist Twitter troll who called himself ‘Americanist’, and whose handle was @BreakObama. This person launched an all-out virtual assault on Taylor (and other noted media and social media personalities), tweeting her personal contact information for public consumption, assailing her with nasty racial epithets, and menacingly telling her to watch her back. I mean, you could practically see the fumes of hate blistering from his every word: “@goldietayler, I know where you work. Better watch over your shoulder. But you won’t know before it happens.”
Goldie and her supporters alerted Twitter admins to
no avail. Pleas to suspend the offending account were met with silence. Taylor
finally sought the help of a follower… an attorney known on the microblogging
site as ‘Wieland’ (@lawscribe) who, thanks to
his sharp internet sleuthing, was able to track down and expose the racist
cyber terrorist. Wieland then tweeted his findings to @FBIDallas and Twitter, who finally decided to suspend the @BreakObama
account this past Monday; an action that should have been dealt with posthaste
the moment Goldie Taylor performed the proper protocol per Twitter’s TOS.
Particularly since making pointed cyber threats is considered a federal
crime and are punishable by
up to 5 years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine.
After having the curtain yanked back on him, @BreakObama promptly deleted his LinkedIn account and I'm sure his other social media pages have since been deactivated. Listen, if you're going to be about that troll life, spew hate speech and threaten acts of violence against people on the internet, assume that not everyone will be easily intimidated and will likely strike back. Because if you're brave enough to hurl racial epithets at people on social media and threaten to kill them, then you deserve to be exposed for who and what you truly are... to your employers, colleagues, and to the people who think they know you. Perhaps @BreakObama will reinvent his hateful self under a new online identity, but I’m sure the since the moist rock he resides under has been lifted, it will definitely give him pause.
The stance Wieland and Goldie Taylor took on cyber
harassment is a glowing example of the results you reap when you speak out and serves as a more suitable contrast to this past Sunday’s #TwitterSilence protest— prompted by British
journalist Caitlin Moran, in reaction to threats issued to female journalists— and underscores why being silent was problematic, as well as why those [of us] who don’t
have the luxury of staying
silent, thought the protest was counterproductive. The last thing a person,
particularly a woman, should do is remain silent when being threatened online
or during any other instance in her life. Many likened the protest to a woman altering her life and staying
indoors due to real-time harassment, rather than reporting the abuse and
challenging errant misogyny.
#TwitterSilence relinquishes power to online
bullies, who continue to hide behind the cloak of anonymity posting the addresses
and phone numbers of their target, to cyber stalk, and to threaten acts of harm. And while speaking
out won’t do away with the act of trolling in general, it will definitely help
weed out potentially dangerous people. I’m a firm believer in collecting
receipts and using the information to take legal action against cyber
terrorists who cross the line with declarations of an intent to inflict injury
and putting them on blast, because as Audre Lorde succinctly wrote in her essay The
Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action: “My silences had
not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” Especially if you’re
among a collective of women whose voices are often drowned out and who don't
always have resources or an empathetic ear extended to them when they do seek help.
