Women are more likely to troll other women. That is the message of Natasha Devon, whose experience with Twitter was not what she expected.
Natasha Devon joined Twitter, hoping for highbrow debate, but was left disappointed. “I knew of course about the fabled ‘trolls’, but the prevailing press rhetoric defined ‘trolls’ as male Twitter users, overtly threatening sexual assault,” she said about the way the platform is widely presented. “So when my trolls came, in the form of female users being relentlessly manipulative and snide, I was completely unprepared,” she stated.
Jonathan Bishop is editor of the book, Examining the Concepts, Issues and Implications of Internet Trolling, which includes a chapter showing how it is more likely to be women that delete other women from their friends list because of other women. “My recent research in the area of women’s studies has found that trolls post sexist remarks not because they are in fact sexist, but they know that if the person they are tweeting to a woman that this is most likely to hurt them,” he said. “Like with Natasha Devon, many of the people who trolled Caroline Criado-Perez for wanting less men on banknotes were women.”
Natasha Devon says she struggles to understand why she was trolled so often by other women. “We came up with so many theories as to who these women were and what their beef was, we could have written an entire series of Dynasty,” she said. “I had planned to remain silent on the topic, but after repeatedly being poked with a stick by Twitter users demanding to know why I wasn’t being a ‘Good Feminist’, I finally relented and listed my (numerous) reasons.”
Devon explained how there was a campaign of ‘cyber-hickery’ against her following becoming involved with a “No More Page Three” petition. “[O]ne of the petition’s signatories began bombarding me (as well as anyone I happened to converse with) on Twitter,” she said. “It was not so much the content of these initial tweets that was the problem, so much as the sheer volume of them.
“She would tweet me sometimes 20 or 30 times a day, using a fake picture and avatar.“
