Mob Censorship: Online Harassment of US Journalists in Times of Digital Hate and Populism

Abstract

Rising numbers of online attacks against journalists have been documented globally. Female, minority reporters and journalists who cover issues interwoven with right-wing identity anchors have been primary targets. This trend reflects growing forms of mob censorship linked to the demonization of journalists and the press by populist leaders. Based on recent cases in the United States, I define mob censorship as bottom-up, citizen vigilantism aimed at disciplining journalism. Effective responses are hard to come by given the pervasiveness of digital hate speech and the limitations of traditional approaches to the problems it represents for democratic communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Safety of journalists
• press censorship
• online trolling
• digital hate

Acknowledgements

I wrote this article while I was a visiting scholar at the Center for Media@Risk, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania during the Spring 2020 semester. I am grateful to Director Barbie Zelizer for the invitation and the hospitality.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Brigading is the process of coordinating a hate campaign on one site that is later deployed on targets on another site. Swatting is a prank in which malicious actors call the police to intervene violently on other Internet users.

2 In this regard, I depart from classic approaches to the study of mobs. I do not view mobs as necessarily tied to specific classes and situations in social structures - the social déclassé, “the refuse of all classes” left behind by capitalism, as Arendt (2017) notably argued. Nor do I understand mobs as irrational actors (Rule 2018) or as virtuous, noble citizens who usher in positive revolutions (McClelland 2010). Classic studies embedded in aristocratic assumptions had viewed the crowd with contempt as barbarous, rowdy actors. They constructed the mob as something to fear, as the opposite of desirable, “good” citizenship characterized by civility and reason. In contrast, other arguments viewed the mob as the liberator, the incarnation of citizens’ democratic energies, whose actions bring about positive political change. I do not share the view that democratic discourse and citizenship only comprise civility and reason; they also include a range of dispositions including passion and emotions that are central to emancipatory politics. Nor do I associate mob politics necessarily with virtuous transformative politics. Violence, as a distinctive element of mob actions, is antithetical to the respect of human dignity and rights.