Monica Lewinsky Thinks Internet Trolls, Not Donald Trump, Won Person of The Year
Image by Getty Images
By Thea Glassman December 8, 2016
Monica Lewinsky doesn’t think that Donald Trump should have been named Time’s Person of the Year.
Instead, the 43-year-old wrote in a Vanity Fair piece published Wednesday, it was the internet trolls who deserved to take the crown.
“It’s been quite a year for the bullying gremlins,” Lewinsky explained. “…they sprouted and proliferated, passed a tipping point, and ran rampant across the Web.”
The social activist cited a number of malicious trolling incidents from racist attacks against comedian Leslie Jones to vicious targeting of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee during the National Anthem. The trolling extended to the academic sphere as well — with social psychologist Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy receiving nasty backlash after her TED talk on body language went viral.
And then, of course, there are the politically-minded trolls.
“The political trolls and bots overpopulated the Internet, feeding on negativity, disseminating disinformation, and becoming more vitriolic as November 8 approached,” Lewinsky wrote. “The effects, from which we are still reeling, have changed our country profoundly.
Lewinsky pointed to the serious and tragic ramifications of all this negativity, including, most recently, bullied teen Brandy Vela shooting herself in front of her family.
“So what are we to do?” Lewinsky asked.
She applauded the trend of Jews reclaiming the parenthetical “echoes” from anti-Semites and pointed to positive policy changes Twitter, Reddit and Facebook have been enacting to combat trolls.
But it shouldn’t end there.
There needs to be a social media strategy against trolling from the get-go, she said, and not as an after thought.
“Rather than trying to clean up our messes ex post facto, we can consider engendering empathic responses and creating environments in social media that, from their initial designs, foster support, compassion, and community,” Lewinsky explained. “Bake empathy into the cake rather than frosting it later.”
Thea Glassman is an Associate Editor at the Forward. Reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter at @theakglassman.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
