Video: This Guy Explains Why Internet is a Living Harassment for Women

John Oliver just took on one of the biggest, most disturbing problems of the internet. One of the things that makes John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” great is the way that it sheds light on terrible problems that are extremely easy to ignore if you aren’t directly affected by them. This week, Oliver finally took on one of the biggest: Online harassment, particularly of women.

In the latest video, Oliver talks about the issue of online harassment when it comes to women. From rape, death threats to gamers who are women to revenge porn from disgruntled ex-boyfriends, the Internet is not the greatest place if you’re a woman.

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Oliver, in his video, discusses how women in the US have faced death threats on Twitter. For example, one gamer was told by a man that he had already been in jail for 12 for “manslaughter” and that he would come to her house and rape her and remove her head.

One of the worst aspects of the internet can be the way it can magnify the worst aspects of interacting with others. Oliver took the time recently to explore the frighteningly specific threats of violence women get online and how the legal system deals with it.

Oliver illustrates this with clips of women describing the very graphic and violent threats they’ve received online for what they say have no reason.

And there’s plenty more to unpack.

You can watch the whole segment here:

“[This] can potentially affect any woman who makes the mistake of having a thought in her mind, and then vocalizing it online,” Oliver said.

Oliver goes on to speak about how this is compounded by the fact that law enforcement is ill-equipped to handle death threats online – and often don’t even know what Twitter is. “That’s a problem,” said Oliver, “because the police cannot investigate a crime if they genuinely don’t understand the medium in which it happened.”

As some of the women in the video point out, even going to police does not help because the authorities are unsure of how to deal with the crime, given that Twitter affords anonymity to its users.

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With revenge porn, the lack of clear laws in the US means that women once again do not have a legal solution. Of course the argument that is bandied about is that don’t take nude pictures.

But as the nude pictures hacking of Hollywood stars like Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Kaley Cuoco, Kirsten Dunst, revealed the issue is not whether one takes nude pictures or not; rather it is privacy. The fact that hackers targeted the private iCloud accounts of these actresses to leak these pictures, (the leaks were also accompanied with threats that more such photos were coming) and got away with it, shows that there is really no legal recourse for women. And these were major celebrities, so for ordinary woman it is doubly harder to fight for justice.

In India too, online harassment of women, especially women journalists remains a major problem. Death threats, allegations about their personal lives, are often tweeted out on the social media site without any consequences. More recently Zee News journalist Swati Chaturvedi recently filed an FIR against Twitter handle Lutyens Insider for tweeting out slanderous stuff against which included calling her ‘nymphomania.’

She pointed out in a piece for DailyO that “Journalists especially women are hunted for sport, abused, slandered and hounded by trolls who hunt in hyena-like packs.” Even Twitter’s former CEO Dick Costolo acknowledged that the site has a troll problem.

The Internet is a wonderful thing, which lets us connect with people, pretty much order anything we want, but if you’re a woman with an opinion, it’s an entirely different game. From comments on websites to tweets, for women navigating the Internet without face encountering abuse is an impossible task.

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