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An urgently needed reckoning with the harm, harassment, and abuse women face on the Internet, exploring fundamental questions about how we understand violence online and featuring deep reporting on how women are surviving the trauma—by an award-winning reporter
When Alia Dastagir published a story for USA Today as part of an investigation into child sexual abuse, she became the target of an online mob launched by QAnon and encouraged by Donald Trump, Jr. While female journalists, politicians, academics, and influencers receive a disproportionate amount of online attacks because of the nature of their professions, all women online experience hate, with psychological effects akin to physical violence.
In To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person, Dastagir complicates the way we think about violence on the Internet, offering a deeper understanding of the psychological negotiations women wrestle with during online abuse and explaining why women are not weak for their human responses to fear and harm.
Dastagir recounts her own experiences of online abuse with intimacy and rigorous honesty, weaving together her story with those of thirteen other women who have faced violence online, including a comedian who uses feminist humor to cope and an ob-gyn who channels anger over her online harassment to fight attacks on reproductive rights. Dastagir examines how words harm and why words that hurt one woman may not necessarily trigger or traumatize another; she explores the physical impact of online violence and analyzes how such abuse intersects with disinformation. She argues that while online abuse is often framed as a problem of misogyny, it is also connected to a culture of white supremacy and the systems with which it intertwines; she explores the places hate can show up, from Zoom bombing and online dating to social media and even your doorstep. Throughout, she blends critical analysis from psychologists, sociologists, neuroscientists, technologists, and philosophers.
To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person is the book on online abuse for this cultural moment, when being online is a daily necessity for so many, even as we grow ever more polarized. Systemic solutions are key to combating violence online, but women also deserve a nuanced examination of what it means to effectively cope to empower them to raise their voices against the forces bent on silencing them.
