Online abuse is a tawdry attempt to limit what we say

Online abuse is a tawdry attempt to limit what we say | Carole Cadwalladr

Being called a ‘crazy cat woman’ was an attempt to control and shame. It won’t work

Words aren’t cheap, they’re free. And in this age – of Facebook, of Twitter – they travel far and fast. Words that are intended to wound or damage are tossed off in the blink of an eye, tapped out in a few seconds flat, on a keyboard, or a phone, and then – press send, hit return, whoosh, they’re gone.

Except they’re not. They circulate forever. Their impact goes on. As I discovered on Tuesday morning. I stepped off a flight from Stockholm, turned on my phone and saw half a dozen messages with screenshots of a now-deleted tweet. It was from Andrew Neil, sent apparently at 3.15am. In response to a question about something else, he said: “Nothing compared to having to deal with mad cat woman from Simpson’s, Karol Kodswallop.”

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Kdq4o6

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