Before social media, a school bully would have reached maybe a dozen students, says Debra Straten. But the audience of one of Ricky’s abusers totaled more than 2,000 on Instagram. “That feels like an overwhelming wave of negativity. There must really be something wrong with you if hundreds of people you don’t even know hate your guts and wish you were dead,” she says.

Sara Straten, who works as a police officer, wants justice for her son, but it has been an uphill struggle. For months, she pressed the school to intervene. After a hunt, she found a detective who investigated three of Ricky’s classmates for violating Texas’s cyberbullying statutes, known as David’s Law. Now a case is making slow progress through the juvenile justice system.

Ricky, meanwhile, wants back on Instagram. “I understand that, because all his friends are on Instagram,” says Sara Straten. “He feels like he’s being punished, but I don’t know how else to protect him.”

— Geoffrey A. Fowler

Oliver Darcy, senior media reporter for CNN. (John Nowak/CNN)

Oliver Darcy has had a front-row view of online hate all year, reporting on social media’s many ills for CNN. But in September, the senior media reporter unexpectedly found himself caught in the middle of the story.

Darcy had arrived at the Capitol for a congressional hearing where Twitter’s chief executive was testifying. He had just taken his place in line when Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and host of Infowars, charged toward him — and began accosting him as an “anti-free speech coward,” as Jones broadcast it on Twitter’s streaming service, Periscope.

For weeks, Darcy had reported on Jones’s videos, probing whether his attacks, including on the victims of recent school shootings, violated prohibitions on hate speech put into place by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Facebook and YouTube had already banned Jones. Twitter banished him a day after his invective against Darcy, for videos threatening reporters.

But the ban didn’t stop a tide of online hate directed at Darcy. One Twitter user called him the “scum of the universe.” The blowback became particularly severe among some users who present themselves as conservative and spread “misinformation about his reporting on misinformation,” as Darcy puts it. Many of Trump’s supporters have echoed the president’s language attacking CNN, Darcy says, such as one user who tweeted that Darcy was the “king of conspiracies and fake news.”

CNN security has been monitoring Darcy’s Twitter feed more aggressively this year for trolls, including those who have tried to post his address online. Darcy filters his mentions so he’s less likely to see their threats. “While you want to say it doesn’t get to you or influence your thinking, it does somehow seep into your mentality,” he says.

But the barrage of attacks also have come to inform his reporting, he says. Darcy’s feeds offer constant evidence that Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites have failed to slow the onslaught of online hate — even if they take action against someone like Jones.

“These are multibillion-dollar companies,” he says. “How they cannot get those things straight is beyond bewildering.”

— Tony Romm

Professional skateboarder Charlie Wilkins received death threats after being misidentified as an Antifa protester. (Desiree Ronald Astorga)

It seemed funny, at first, to Charlie Wilkins that so many people had gotten it so wrong.

People on Twitter were scrambling to find out who had said cruel things to a 9/11 widow in a video that went viral in October — and they stumbled, incorrectly, onto Wilkins. They were passing his name and photos around, but they were targeting the wrong guy. Soon they’d realize it, he thought, and move on.

He was halfway through his morning coffee when he started to get scared. Hundreds, then thousands, were cursing him, rifling through his past, talking about where he lived and how to get him back. They screamed at his bosses to fire him. They called his wife a “satanic pedophile.” The next thing he knew, it was 9:30 at night, and he had barely moved from his computer screen.

He’d called the police, who sent officers to his home as the threats streamed in. “I know where you hang out,” one said. “Watch your back.”

Wilkins believed he could convince the faceless online mob that it was targeting the wrong guy. He messaged dozens of people directly, showing them proof, telling them the viral-video guy had made him mad, too. Some believed him, said sorry and disappeared. Others only grew angrier.

No matter what he did, there was someone else, with some new flicker of rage. “It felt like a thousand rabbits got out, and you’re just trying to catch them all,” he says.

He tried to take it in stride. It was just the Internet. But they were targeting his family, his job, his friends. They were everywhere, and the rage felt nearly endless, and he had no idea where they would stop. “They’ll squash anybody you’re associated with,” he says. “They’ll go after everybody until your life is ruined.”

Within a few days, the masses had moved on to something new. He tried to laugh it off. One night shortly after the attack, he was eating dinner at home, looking out a window at the Portland, Ore., neighborhood that had always given him quiet bliss. It was black outside, where he imagined someone with a sniper rifle, hiding, piercing the nighttime stillness, sending a bullet through the back of his head.

It was a bad vision, he knew. He was safe. Still, he moved away from the glass.

— Drew Harwell

Wanna Thompson, a Toronto-based freelance writer. (Wanna Thompson)

Everybody has opinions about music. But when Wanna Thompson expressed hers on Twitter about Nicki Minaj, she got rebuked directly by the famous rapper — and then swarms of her angry fans.

“You know how dope it would be if Nicki put out mature content?” the Toronto-based freelance writer tweeted in June. “She’s touching 40 soon, a new direction is needed.”

The rapper, who has more than 20 million Twitter followers, caught sight of Thompson’s tweet and posted an indirect response defending her maturity. Minaj’s fans made the connection and started sending Thompson hundreds of hateful replies. “My Twitter was broken,” Thompson says.

The next day, according to Thompson, she got a direct message from Minaj herself, calling her “ugly” and other insults. “Just say u jealous I’m rich, famous intelligent, pretty and go!” it read.

After some deliberation, Thompson tweeted a photo of the message from Minaj. “There was a lot of miscommunication going on. So I had to clear my name,” Thompson says.

Then the hate from Minaj’s loyal fans, known as Barbz, really started flowing — on Twitter and Instagram, in emails, and after they found her phone number online. It “entered a new territory of terrifying,” Thompson says. “They called me a b----, they said they’re going to kill me, they’re going to find me,” she says. Someone Photoshopped a picture of her daughter to liken her to a monkey.

“Wow, this is over a music opinion,” Thompson recalls thinking. “Her fans have a background of being nasty to people, which she kind of encourages.”

(A representative for Minaj didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Thompson says that after she posted the messages from Minaj, she lost a writing job. As a writer about culture and hip-hop, “I don’t want this to be a mark on my career,” she says.

Six months later, Thompson says the hateful messages are still coming.

Online fan culture, she says, is evolving far away from just sharing similar interests. “Is this their way of connecting with each other? Or proving their worth to their favorite artist?” she says. “It is only going to get worse because a lot of celebrities are not thinking, not saying, ‘Hey guys, don’t do that.’ ”

— Geoffrey A. Fowler

Rachel McKinnon smiles from the podium after winning first place in her age group at the UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championship at the Velo Sports Center in Carson, Calif., on Oct. 13. (Craig Huffman/Craig Huffman Photography)

Rachel McKinnon was proud. She’d won a major championship in a track-cycling race in October, breaking a world record and accomplishing a feat for which she’d been training for years. She’d also become the first transgender woman to ever win it. She celebrated by posting a photo of herself on Twitter, beaming from the podium.

She’d expected some hatred: At work, online and in her sport, she had routinely endured anxiety and trauma over the decade since her transition began. Then her tweet went viral. Suddenly, an online army of people she’d never met was criticizing everything that had made her who she was.

The sheer volume of it was stunning and disappointing. Thousands of hateful comments — saying she cheated, she didn’t belong or worse — poured in during what should have been one of the happiest times in her life.

“After a certain point, it becomes a blur,” says McKinnon, a college philosophy professor in Charleston, S.C. “The negative messages outweighed the positive by about 3,000 to 1.”

In the past, she’d changed her phone number, worried someone would publish it as part of a harassment campaign. But she began to change even more. She asked a friend to monitor her Twitter account. She turned off her phone notifications. She stopped taking photos around her home, for fear they might give clues to her address.

She had reached a new peak in her athletic identity, but she couldn’t stop hiding herself away: going back through her online history to make things private; cultivating online block lists; pulling personal details off her résumé. At race events, she needed to have videos and headphones “to tune out the world.”

She is still proud: “I have a jersey and a medal that can’t be taken away,” she says. But she is also tired and overwhelmed. On Facebook, she took her name — Rachel McKinnon, world champion — and changed it to something else.

— Drew Harwell

Source：The Washington Post