3
" In 2015, the writer Alex Blank Millard engaged in her own gender-swap experiment to highlight the misogynist nature of online abuse.
Sick of constantly receiving rape threats from ‘faceless eggs’ online, she changed her Twitter profile photo to that of a white man – but kept the content she posted the same.
When Millard tweeted about rape culture, fat shaming, and systemic oppression as Lady Alex, the standard response was a deluge of rape and death threats, and a bunch of guys calling her fat. When she commented on the same things as Straight- and Cis-Looking White Dude Alex, she was retweeted, favourited, and even cited by Buzzfeed (Millard, 2015). "
― Emma A. Jane , Misogyny Online: A Short (and Brutish) History (SAGE Swifts)
5
" The word spread.
It began with the techno-literates: young summoners who couldn’t quite get their containment circles right and who had fallen back on Facebook to keep themselves occupied while the sacred incense was cooked in their mum’s microwaves; eager diviners who scoured the internet for clues as to the future of tomorrow, and who read the truth of things in the static at the corners of the screen; bored vampires who knew that it was too early to go out and hunt, too late still to be in the coffin. The message was tweeted and texted onwards, sent out through the busy wires of the city, from laptop to PC, PC to Mac, from mobile phones the size of old breeze blocks through to palm-held devices that not only received your mail, but regarded it as their privilege to sort it into colour-coordinated categories for your consideration. The word was whispered between the statues that sat on the imperial buildings of Kingsway, carried in the scuttling of the rats beneath the city streets, flashed from TV screen to TV screen in the flickering windows of the shuttered electronics stores, watched over by beggars and security cameras, and the message said:
We are Magicals Anonymous.
We are going to save the city. "
― Kate Griffin , Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous, #1)
6
" All the bad publicity they brought down on us, yes, it came, and yes, it hurt us—for a day. That’s how long the dirt clung, maybe a bit less. Twitter, Facebook, TV and internet news—you know how long a story stays up on a news website these days, unless it’s about some celebrity scandal? Guess. Go on—guess. Three hours. That’s how much we hurt. And then the world turned, and someone tweeted something new, and everyone retweeted it and moved on, and nothing fucking changes. That’s the world. That’s people power. That’s all it fucking means. "
― Claire North , The End of the Day
