Actress Ashley Judd has decided it is time to take decisive action against trolls harassing her on Twitter, so she is reporting them to the police.
On the Today show earlier in the week, Judd said she will report harassment from now on as a way to stand up to the notion that the internet has removed all personal accountability.
“Everyone needs to take personal responsibility for what they write, and not allow this misinterpretation and shaming culture on social media to persist. And by the way, I’m pressing charges,” she told interviewer Craig Melvin.
“The amount of gender violence I experience is absolutely extraordinary, and a significant part of my day today will be spent filing police reports at home about gender violence that’s directed at me on social media,” she continued.
“That many people?” Melvin challenged.
“That many people, that explicit, that overt,” Judd replied.
“The way things happen on social media is so abusive.”
She said that while she does not necessarily expect her decision to press charges to result in punitive action, she said she hopes it will help break down the idea of immunity for anonymous trolls.
Judd decided to take action following a particularly egregious spout of harassment on Twitter after she used the platform to comment on a basketball game she was watching during America’s March Madness season.
She received abusive comments, including threats of violence, soon after she began tweeting about the sport.
“When I express a stout opinion during #MarchMadness I am called a whore, c—, threatened with sexual violence. Not okay,” she said on Twitter in response to the abuse.
She then began retweeting abuse tweets she received. The tweets included particularly offensive name-calling and threats, and seemed to be coming in in spades.
Unsurprisingly, Judd received further abuse in response to her decision to take a stand. She replied to one Twitter user who called her “mentally weak” by writing:
“Example: I am mentally weak for not tolerating sodomy threats.”
Fox News presenter Mark Fuhrman criticised Judd for her stance.
Referring to March Madness basketball season, he said: “If you don’t want to play, then shut up.”
The issue of abuse on Twitter has come to the fore recently, with stories about Jezabel writer Lindy West and feminist speaker and blogger Anita Sarkeesian drawing attention to the danger of the platform.
Twitter’s CEO immediately spoke out about the importance taking action to better protect its users.
“We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years… I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It’s absurd. There’s no excuse for it,” chief executive Dick Costolo wrote in a memo circulated to Twitter staff.
“We’ve drawn a line on what constitutes harassment and abuse. I believe that we haven’t yet drawn that line to put the cost of dealing with harassment on those doing the harassing. It shouldn’t be the person who’s being harassed who has to do a lot of work,” he later told the New York Times.
Twitter has since been developing plans to make the platform safer and better respond to and prevent online harassment.