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Online Abuse and US Politics, a Conversation with Moya Bailey and Nina Jankowicz

Moya Bailey, Nina Jankowicz, and Sarah Sobieraj

The following conversation took place through SquadCast in May 2025. An edited transcript is below.

Listen to the conversation and subscribe to the Ask a Feminist podcast.

Sarah Sobieraj (SS): Kamala Harris, Nikki Haley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Jasmine Crockett. When women step into the political spotlight, they’re often met with a barrage of gendered and racialized attacks. And while there have always been hecklers, the evolution of information and communication technologies have changed the game. What does this landscape of identity-based abuse and harassment look like? What impact does it have in general? I’m Sarah Sobieraj, and on this episode of “Ask a Feminist,” Moya Bailey and Nina Jankowitz are going to help us understand the way intersectional inequality, technology, and politics intersect. We will also take advantage of the critical distance we now have from the 2024 election to reflect on what Kamala Harris’s candidacy can teach us going forward.

Welcome to both of you.

Moya Bailey (MB): Thank you for having us.

SS: I’d love to start by asking each of you how you became interested in this issue. Moya, would you start?

MB: Sure. So I think like a lot of young people, I was curious about how the world works; what are the things and who are the people making the laws that shape the way we move in society? And of course as somebody who lives in a body that is very much outside of the mainstream, I was curious about the way that women, people of color, queer people were coming into politics. And so I’ve always been curious about how people make change and get to the place of creating the world we want to see. And politics for a long time has been the way to do that.

SS: Great. Nina, how did you become interested?

Nina Jankowicz (NJ): Well, I went to a women’s college. So that was my first introduction. I went to Bryn Mawr as an undergrad. But more broadly, within my scholarship, I was working on my first book, which was on Russian disinformation. And I ran into two women in the course of my interviews for the book who stopped me mid-interview, when we were talking about Russian disinformation campaigns, and said “I actually have something else I’d like to talk about if that’s okay.” And as an interviewer, you never say no to that, right? 

One of them was a Ukrainian member of Parliament. She’s no longer in Parliament, but at the time she was. Her name is Svetlana Zalishchuk, and she had been a journalist. And then after the Revolution of Dignity, Euromaidan, she went into politics and was very much on the prodemocracy, anticorruption boat in Ukraine and had been really outspoken. She was young and a woman in politics, and Ukraine is a country where gender equality is a dream. (Although they do have more women in Parliament than we do in the United States.)  But that being said, she had undergone quite a severe image-based sexual-abuse campaign that seemed to stem from the aggressor state, from Russia. There was a campaign that superimposed her face onto a naked woman’s body. I found that there were a lot of instances of this across Central and Eastern Europe. 

And then when we looked back at the 2016 election, of course, you see Russia’s portrait of Hillary Clinton differently. And—this was around 2018 when I was originally doing this research—as we got closer to the 2020 election, I really wanted to document this further. I was at the Wilson Center at the time and we documented how not only women who were running for office in the US election in 2020 were treated, but how women on the national stage were treated by our adversaries as well in the gendered ways that their propaganda and disinformation attempted to undermine their participation in the public sphere But I think understanding the way is that undermining women broadly undermines democracy, which helps autocratic and authoritarian states is a key to understanding the power dynamics at play in the twenty-first century right now.

SS: Fantastic. And I think we’ll be coming back to many of those themes. Moya, returning to you for a second, when did you get the idea that the concept “misogynoir” needed to come into existence? What prompted that?

MB: So I was working on my dissertation, which was looking at the way that medical school yearbooks actually shaped the way that future physicians think about themselves and patients. And I was looking at this moment in Emory School of Medicine’s history, when the Flexner Report had been released. So this is the 1910s, and when this report is released, Flexner really comes up with a very strict understanding of what a medical student should be. And in these medical school yearbooks, these students were responding to that and really trying to understand themselves in relationship to future patient populations. So yearbooks of that time were somewhere between what we imagine a yearbook to be now and a magazine. There were stories in there and also articles. And what I found really interesting was that there were lots of representations of Black women and Black women as caricatures. So this is Emory School of Medicine, segregated South, 1910s. And there are these really awful just representations of Black women in this text. And what I came to realize was that this was how the students were sort of negotiating their own dis-ease as future physicians with a patient population that they saw as their antithesis. 

And the caricatures that were drawn about Black women actually then mirrored things that I was seeing in real life at that current moment, almost a hundred years later, as I’m working on the dissertation. So I was like, what is it about Black women specifically? Because it wasn’t other women of color; there were definitely representations of white women in the text, but they weren’t represented anywhere nearly as vilely as Black women were, so there was something very specific about that representation then and the representation I was seeing at the time. Trying to make sense of that is how I came to the term “misogynoir.” What is it about Black women that is so disheartening, so frightening, so visceral that provokes this response? And “misogynoir” was how I came to characterize it, because it was so unique to the experiences of Black women.

SS: That makes so much sense, and it also actually segues to laying the land on this topic, because we know people can be cruel and abusive online, of course, and that politicians from every conceivable background have had to deal with hostility, whether it’s on social media or via email or chat rooms, even going back. But what’s unique about the treatment of women in general and women from underrepresented groups in particular when we’re talking about the hostility that’s directed at them? Can you describe it for us?

MB: The most classic ones unfortunately predate even this current moment. We can go back, not even that far, to the Obama administration and how people talked about Michelle Obama. There were lots of comparisons of her to a monkey, people calling her a man. All of these things are very much steeped in beliefs about Black women as being more masculine. There were also representations of Michelle as a ballbuster or  this caricature that has existed for a long time called the Sapphire—somebody who is taking a lot of shots at men and someone who is perceived as angry and aggressive. The newer version of the Sapphire is what we understand as the “angry Black woman.” So these caricatures have these roots and antecedents in a moment, post-Reconstruction, in the country where people were trying to figure out how race and gender worked, and people were really doing the work of policing people through representation and trying to make sense of what people didn’t like, which was Black people’s perceived freedom in this moment after emancipation. So all of that continues and has manifested in new ways in the social media moment.

And I do think that there’s an idea that women shouldn’t be in the public sphere generally. That’s all women. What I see happening is a real push to try to discipline women away from using social media, talking about the issues that are important to them. And we see that playing out through all these different ways that people are attacking them and saying negative comments on these platforms.

SS: Yeah. Nina, what do you notice about the things that differentiate the abuse that’s directed at women and women of color in particular?

NJ: Well, the data is really strong that women of intersectional identities receive more and more vitriolic abuse than their white cisgender counterparts. I’ve seen that across a number of studies, including my own. In the 2020 election, when we looked at thirteen candidates for office, the women who were of intersectional backgrounds, primarily women of color, although I believe we had at least one in the data set who was a sexual minority as well, they received, again, far and away more abuse than their white counterparts. 

And, you know, it’s not a competition, right? But I think we need to recognize the old adage that no one is free until everyone is free, no one is safe until everyone is safe. When we’re designing these systems on social media for trust and safety, as it’s now called, often these systems are designed with white cisgender men in mind, not even men and women, just white cisgender guys and not the constellation of different backgrounds that actually use social media. By pointing out and showing the raw numbers to say “this is the sort of thing that women of intersectional backgrounds receive and this is the sort of thing that men receive or that white cisgender women receive,” it just shows a scale of harm that I think for most people who haven’t experienced or researched this phenomenon is really quite shocking. 

In terms of specific examples, one of the things that really stays with me from some of the early focus groups that I did looking at gender disinformation and gender abuse online was a Black woman who told me that, frequently, the first thing that happens to her when she is undergoing a widespread networked harassment campaign is that her children are brought into it. And as a white woman who’s dealt with my fair share of harassment as well—people have gone after my family, but it takes a while to escalate to that. And we interviewed a number of Black women about this, and it was almost universal that their families are brought into it. Things were said like, “Oh, well, I hope your son doesn’t encounter a cop anytime soon.” I mean, it turns my stomach just to think about it. 

Often Black women are also subjected to what we term offline harassment, but I don’t think the online/offline dichotomy is helpful anymore, right? We live in an internet age. We use the internet to communicate, to do work, to engage with one another, to have friends and familial relationships. It’s not as if we can cut it out of our lives unless you go live in the middle of the woods, which I think about sometimes. 

Black women will have doxing events happening more frequently to them. They will have swatting events happening more frequently to them or things that are often categorized by police or other law enforcement as just pranks, like having twenty pizzas ordered to their house. But that’s a threat, right? It’s “we know where you live, and next time it might be worse.” So that’s the sort of stuff that we see when we look at the raw data. Again, in our study, the women of color received numerically more harassment, and—here’s just one statistic that will always stay with me: This can be partially explained by the fact that she was the most prominent woman in politics at the time, but Kamala Harris in the 2020 election, over a period of two months, over six social media platforms and thirteen candidates, received 78 percent of the 336,000 pieces of abuse and gender disinformation that we tracked. And many of the narratives that we tracked in the 2020 election just were hot and ready to return the moment she announced her candidacy in 2024.

SS: You know, it’s so interesting to hear you mentioning that story about the family being brought into it early because something that has always struck me on this topic is how frequently women’s bodies are central to the abuse, whether it’s threats of sexual assaults or commentary on her appearance or presumed sexual behavior—all of that kind of thing. And often, something I’ve noticed is that when men are attacked, it’s often through the women in their lives, so it might become that their wife then, her presumed sexual behavior or appearance becomes ridiculed and the way that gender kind of weaves its way through that; I’ve seen that with daughters as well. But I had not before recognized or thought about the fact that children are brought in quite quickly for Black women in particular. 

How consistent is the abuse, like the content of it? You have lots of women who are being attacked, and for this we’re talking specifically about women in politics, but more broadly, is there a lot of variation in the abuse? Does it sound like a broken record? What do you notice, either of you?

NJ: What we found in our 2020 research is that there are a lot of tropes that do get repeated. Generally you can put gendered online abuse into three buckets: sexual or sexualized, racist or racialized, and transphobic abuse, which Moya touched on before, particularly for Black women. But we do find this for women in politics writ large, that if a woman is outspoken and out there and doing what is perceived as a man’s job, whether that’s being in politics or perhaps a sportscaster or a scientist, often the trope is that Oh, you must secretly have undergone a sex change because a woman should not be in this position. And we found that for Kamala Harris, we found that for AOC, we found that for Jacinda Ardern. So in some ways, these narratives are memeified. But there is some variation from person to person. And one of the things that we found in our 2020 study, which we called “Malign Creativity,” was that the social media platforms were looking for keywords, very obvious keywords. They call them “classifiers” within their AI systems. They were looking for typical words—the B-word, the C-word—that might be slurs used against women. But the abusers are really clever in the ways that they adapt their language to avoid detection. So they would, instead of writing the B word, they would write “b!tch.” Instead of writing the word “Jews,” they would write “juice,” and that would allow them to evade detection. But then on an individual level, nicknaming and memeifying somebody’s existence is a great way to get around AI detection and content moderation without running afoul of the terms of service on platforms. 

So in my personal case, I underwent a big online abuse campaign. It’s still going on, actually. About three years ago, when I was in the Biden administration, the right wing thought that they had a big gotcha moment and they found a TikTok of mine from a couple of years prior to my appointment to the administration in which I was singing a song from Mary Poppins that was parodied to be about disinformation. I have no regrets about the TikTok, but they thought it was the cringiest thing they had ever seen. And they call me “Mary Poppins,” or they call me “the singing censor,” because they all believe that I was censoring Americans, which is not true. And that is one of the ways that they network abuse around me. 

And then there’s all sorts of visual memes that come from that. For each person, it’s intensely personal, which makes the—I’m not giving the social media platforms an excuse, don’t get me wrong—but it makes the task of moderating much more difficult. And so what we advocated for back then—and it seems like a pipe dream now with Elon Musk’s internet and the broligarchy that we exist in…. But we advocated—particularly for high-profile individuals who are undergoing significant abuse—that the social media platforms proactively reach out to them and their teams, particularly for members of Congress or political candidates. This should be something that they all do because they want a healthy democratic discourse. However, we’ve seen that that’s not the case. And what this would do would allow those policy teams to understand the unique challenges faced by each of those women.

To a person that’s not undergoing abuse, let’s say, it might seem like something trivial, but when it’s thousands upon thousands of individualized messages that are meant to push you out of public life, to make you think twice before speaking, to self-censor, it really is a weight to carry around. And it also makes it feel a little bit ickier, to use a highly scientific term, right? All of these people are taking all of this time to create this stuff about me? They’re just enjoying, relishing in memeifying me and making me into a folk villain. And that is why, for some people, they really just self-select out after it happens. 

SS: We can return to that. Moya, does that resonate with you seeing this as highly individualized? Do you see things that are consistent or … ?

MB: Yes. It’s highly individualized but again those same tropes. So what you talked about, Nina—transphobic, misogynistic, and then also racist—part of what I talk about with misogynoir is that those things are often embedded, and it’s hard to separate and disentangle them when it comes to Black women. These tropes kind of hit all at the same time. 

One of the ways that we saw this with Kamala was the way that people talked about her and Joe Biden running together as “Joe and the ho.” That language is very specific and I think speaks to both the way that “ho” is racialized and then also the way that she is understood as a Black woman in relationship to him. 

SS: Speaking of Harris: I’m sure the two of you were watching the campaign very closely given your interests. What stood out for you as you watched the public response online. When the Harris nomination came to be in the unusual way in which it unfolded, there was a groundswell online that was very positive and supportive as well. But thinking more about the criticism, what did you notice about the backlash?

MB: I mean, one of the things I wrote about was that there were lots of legitimate critiques of Harris that then got obscured because of misogynoir; people did not want to talk about policy or those sorts of questions, and it became more about what does it mean to have a Black woman in this position? And then there was also a lot of malignment based on stereotypes and tropes about Black women, but people weren’t really commenting on her record, and that to me is just the way that misogynoir operates. You can have somebody who is completely competent. There’s no argument to be made that is a realistic one, an honest one, that says that she was unqualified for the position. And yet, that was some of the language that was used. I mean, she has the record; she has the most experience, the most impressive resume, but that was not at all where people were going with their critiques of her or her campaign.

SS: Nina?

NJ: For me, I guess it was shocking the extent to which, as I mentioned before, the same narratives, the same memes, that had been trotted out in 2020 were just at the ready in 2024. And there was really little divergence from that. I will say it was difficult for us to quantify the engagement with those narratives because we don’t have API (application programming interface) access to the social media platforms anymore. So the APIs that used to allow us to scrape and analyze data from the platforms have either all been monetized or shut off.

And so we didn’t have the same level of robust data that we had in 2020. The few divergences that we saw from the key narratives that I mentioned before had to do with competence, just like Moya said. The biggest one was the earrings during the debate that were apparently a listening device. Because she couldn’t possibly have performed that well with a senile old man next to her unless she were being fed the questions in her ear, right? 

There were still some people who just could not stomach voting for a woman who was X, Y, and Z, they believed based on the disinformation that had been spread about her. And I think that is part of the sadness that a lot of women in America are feeling right now as we look at the ways that our rights are being rolled back during the Trump administration and the fact that  so many women themselves voted against their own rights, just because they couldn’t stomach voting for a woman who they believed was something she was not. That’s something that weighs heavily on me on days where, you know, we see particular attacks on rights from this administration, which appears to be all of them lately.

We actually saw more pickup, I would say (although I’m kind of putting my finger in the air again, because we didn’t have the robust data collection that we did in 2020) we saw more pickup of the transphobic narrative that Kamala Harris is secretly a man named Kamal Aroush, and they use bad Photoshop to masculinize her portrait. I think they may even do a face mesh with Barack Obama, which is on so many levels so gross and it makes me so mad. 

But that’s the sort of thing we saw. I don’t know if people actually believe it, right? But they’re sharing it either because they believe it or they think it’s funny. And I don’t see that sort of rhetoric being used against any man in political office and the same with the “sleeping her way to the top” narrative. 

It wasn’t just discussion about her alleged promiscuity. It was so sexualized, especially with the availability of deepfakes, pseudopornographic material (nonconsensual, of course), editing her into lingerie and sexually suggestive positions. I’ve never seen that be done to Mitch McConnell. I’m sure some people are doing it to Donald Trump, but we don’t see it bandied about on every single social media platform and accepted. And one of the things that really just turned my stomach was the fact that the Trump campaign allowed independent vendors outside of Trump rallies to sell merchandise with this gendered and sexualized rhetoric on it. 

SS: Right. And before Trump’s ascendance, national-level political leaders have always been harshly critical of one another, and are probably pretty rotten privately, but they tended to be more diplomatic in their public presentation of those critiques. But now that it appears to be politically useful to be offensive and bombastic, we have so many more national-level officeholders who openly attack in a manner we associate with trolls. This is another thing that shapes the climate digitally for people from disadvantaged backgrounds and for all of us even if we’re “just” in the audience there.

MB: I’m also thinking about the limits of political parties and their, you know, kind of the old guard within the Democratic Party and how they have and haven’t responded to this current moment and how they, you know, haven’t really supported some of the junior legislators, who are really the ones who are putting pressure and trying to make a move in this moment. But I think about Jasmine Crockett and other people who, by and large, are on their own when it comes to making the statements and not getting the support from the party that they should or could. Where are the Democrats in supporting the young women and the young women of color, members of The Squad or not, who are doing this work and trying to push back in real ways?

It does not seem like they are getting the support that they deserve or need from the party. So misogynoir, again, is not just happening on one side of the aisle. There are ways that these questions need to be asked of the Democrats as well.

SS: So I guess the question would be that we’ve been talking about here– AOC has come up, Jasmine Crockett. Are things easier for women on the Right?

NJ: No, they’re not. We at the American Sunlight Project did a report recently on image-based sexual abuse or what is colloquially called deepfake pornography. And one of the things that we found after scanning over a dozen deepfake websites for the names or nicknames of every sitting member of Congress is that it doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. If you’re a woman in Congress, you are quite likely to be depicted in deepfake sexual abuse. One in six women currently sitting in Congress as of November 2024 was depicted in one of these videos. Only one man out of the several hundred in Congress was depicted there. And that trend extends to online abuse as well. And when I’m advocating for targets of online abuse, because of the allegation that I want to censor my fellow Americans, people on the Right often say, “well, you don’t speak up for Republican women.” And that’s actually not true. I have called out people like Bill Maher for saying that Laura Loomer was sleeping with President Trump. I have called out abuse against people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others who are firebrands on the Right, like Lauren Boebert. Even though I do not agree with them with a single hair on my head, I do not believe that they should be treated in sexualized and gendered ways that their male colleagues are not. This is the truth that we find.  

I think that we need to approach online abuse as a given for people who are entering public life, whether that’s in a newsroom, in an academic position, or in public service, and employers need to think about it proactively, not just retroactively when the ish hits the fan, right? It needs to be something that you have a policy in place for. And too many employers do not think about that right now. So that’s my soapbox moment. That is something that we do have the power to change in this political moment where we’re not going to see tech regulation and we’re not going to see this administration actively taking a stance for those who are being abused online. But if you are somebody who’s a leader in any capacity in any organization, you can create those HR policies the same way, I’m sure, you have policies against what your employees can say online. What do you do when they get attacked in the line of work that you’re in? That’s something that we all need to think about.

SS: It’s such an important reminder that people who we think of as “regular people” also are on the receiving end of this. You had a high-profile position, not an elected one, but still you were visible. But this is also something that’s happened to even people who serve on their school committees, or school board of education, or people who are doing poll work, that kind of thing. And Moya, if I’m not mistaken, you’re seeing this happen a lot with activists as well?

MB: Absolutely, and these targeted campaigns online really can manifest in so many ways. And doxing, I think, is one of the ways that it happens most often, for people who are organizing online and organizing IRL (in real life)–people are figuring out where people live and doing some of these really toxic behaviors that we’ve seen and that Nina mentioned going through herself. 

One of the ways that we shift this is thinking more about how we create the kinds of community standards and community agreements that shift our reality so that people can rely on people who are close to them to support them. Because we’re in a position where we’re going to have to save ourselves; waiting on some of these big regulatory bodies to show up is not going to happen. And so what are our practices? What are the things that we’re saying we won’t allow for that are outside of our own community values? I think that’s the thing that’s really going to shift how people are treated, especially in this moment now.

SS: As we step back to the democratic question, even though all of these things are, of course, political—when we think about this type of treatment, we can think about what that might be like for an individual, as Nina was alluding to. What are the consequences for the public more generally? What are the costs to democracy when we have female politicians, particularly those from marginalized groups, who are treated in ways that might be frightening or riddled with disinformation and hostile and abusive?

MB: I think we’re seeing the reality of the way that power is working in the country at the time, and what I mean by that is we’re not really seeing a democracy that is reflective of the majority of people, we’re seeing a democracy that reflects the people with the most power and what we have decided, unfortunately, as a society, is the people with the most money are the people who have the most power. And I am of the mind that if we can right-size that again, having the government more afraid of the power of the people as opposed to the power of the folks with resources, then we get the democracy that we actually want and desire.

SS: Yeah. And I think what you’re saying about the people with money: One of the ways that that resonates for me is that if this kind of treatment scares some people out of participation—the people who are the most underrepresented, who tend to be the most targeted—if there’s a subset of people who withdraw, even among those groups who are going to be more uncomfortable and threatened in those spaces, the ability to manage is also shaped by money, because if you are a more affluent person with a bigger organization or those sorts of things, you can afford to take some of the measures that can help keep you safe, whether that’s outsourcing your social media or hiring security. 

Nina, what do you see as the impacts on democracy?

NJ: I mean, I think certainly we are seeing women self-selecting out of public life. I regularly talk to young women who come to me for informational interviews, and one of the questions they ask is, “How do I manage a public presence when I don’t want to be abused?” I even talked to some young women when I was writing my book who said things like, “I used to have a public profile on Instagram and I used to be more active with activism and advocacy, but now I’m going to college and I don’t want a lifestyle that public anymore.” But what that does is cut us off from opportunity. It cuts us off from being part of the conversation. And so I always say when I’m talking to audiences that are primarily women, “We have to hold our digital ground.” There are a lot of days that I wish that I could self-select out as well. But I know that if I do that, that’s a win for the people who have been trying to push me out of public life. And it’ll also be a loss for the young woman who look up to me and see how I’m handling these things. I think that’s the biggest problem is that we’re going to have fewer women in public service, fewer women seeking elected office. And when we don’t have those examples there for us, then it’s harder to aspire to something that doesn’t exist. So I worry about that. 

But then there’s all the arguments that have been made for many, many years that now have been stricken from the Defense Department and other government departments lately: That when women are involved in peace-building processes, they last longer. When women are involved in legislative sessions, they legislate not just on “women’s issues” but issues that benefit people from the bottom up across society, right? They pass more bills also. So I think we lose out on all of that. We lose out on a better-functioning democracy when women aren’t involved in public life.

SS: Before we go, I think I’d just love to hear you talk about what you wish people knew or understood about digital hate against political folks.

MB: I wish people understood that this is not unique to political folks, that, particularly from my vantage point, that misogynoir is really unfortunately universal and that it’s happening on all levels. There is a way that it is more visible when it’s happening to political figures or celebrities, but it is the reality that people are existing with on a daily basis. And so my hope is that by having this conversation, we’re starting to get people to think through where does misogynoir show up in your own life? Are you thinking about the Black women who are close to you and kind of what they’re experiencing on a daily basis? Because honestly, a lot of the things that are happening to these politicians are happening to Black women that are in your neighborhood, in your community, and you’re just not hearing those stories. So for me, I hope that this conversation is just a point of awareness for the way that misogynoir functions both on the political level but also in the everyday, in the mundane, of people trying to make it through the world. So my hope is that we acknowledge that and then start to work towards solutions and other ways of representing and thinking about Black women, specifically.

SS: Thank you, Moya. Nina?

NJ: I think the thing that I wish people knew is that, you know, this isn’t just mean words online. If we had mobs of people surrounding us on the street, on our way to work, at our desks–imagine a mob of people around you shouting horrible things at you all day long while you’re trying to work. That’s the experience of online harassment and online hate. Nobody should have to go through that, no matter what their political beliefs are, no matter what you believe they’ve done, or if you really despise who they are as a person, that’s not the society that we should be aspiring toward.

And it’s as simple as that. If those people were doing these things to you on the street, you’d call the cops, and you’d probably get some restraining orders. We don’t have that online. And our thinking needs to catch up to the fact that there isn’t this online/offline dichotomy, that we all exist in one space, and that the internet is an intrinsic part of our daily lives now and we need to protect people’s expression that same way on the internet as we do offline.

SS: I can’t thank you enough. The two of you have been wonderful to have on. Thank you again, to Moya Bailey and Nina Jankowicz and thank you for joining Ask a Feminist.