How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment, reviewed

We look at the latest book by Nina Jankowicz the insightful and readable author. You can see more about How to Be a Woman Online Surviving Abuse and Harassment, and How to Fight Back here on the Bloomsbury website. 

How to Be a Woman Online Surviving Abuse and Harassment

We reviewed Jankowicz’s previous book, almost two years ago How To Lose The Information War, which was excellent. Unfortunately it also generated a lot of vitriol and hate, virtually non of it, explicitly at least, related to the subject matter of the book. She was repeatedly trolled based on her gender, and then quickly became aware that many other women, including other authors who we have reviewed, were also subject to similar vitriol.

Throughout the book Jankowicz has some very practical sections about how to manage your online security, and then also relatable, though sad to hear, passages about the hate, sexual abuse and general trolling that she has been on the receiving end of. It does illustrate that in many ways the online world is still a deeply toxic, and often invariably misogynistic place. While there may be some keyboard warriors, there are far more trolls, and vindictive people, generally men, belittling and attacking women.

How to Be a Woman Online is a relevant and useful book. It is unfortunate that there are so many hate filled people out, and particularly those who have issues with women being intelligent and expressing insightful and accurate assessments of global geopolitics in Jankowicz’s case. It is clear that a lot of regulation, accountability and enforcement of anti hate speech is needed. This book may well insight more vitriol from the anti-woke brigade, but that doesn’t mean that there is not a deep, serious and dark problem with how conversations are conducted in the online world. Hopefully this book goes some way to helping to call out these misguided and outdated ways of speaking and behaving.

Men "burst violently into your mentions and your life like the Kool-aid man, demanding your attention, hawking opinions that they believe are unarguably, manifestly correct and indispensable."

A taxonomy of trolls, excerpted from #HowToBeAWomanOnline: https://t.co/2oWkVIlyMj

— Nina Jankowicz ???? (@wiczipedia) April 25, 2022

More about the book

When Nina Jankowicz’s first book on online disinformation was profiled in The New Yorker, she expected attention but not an avalanche of abuse and harassment, predominantly from men, online.

All women in politics, journalism and academia now face untold levels of harassment and abuse in online spaces. Together with the world’s leading extremism researchers, Jankowicz wrote one of the definitive reports on this troubling phenomenon.

Drawing on rigorous research into the treatment of Kamala Harris – the first woman vice-president – and other political and public figures, Nina also uses her own experiences to provide a step-by-step plan for dealing with harassment, abuse, doxing and disinformation in online spaces.

The result is a must-read for researchers, journalists and all women with a profile in the online space.

More about the author here

Nina Jankowicz is a Washington DC-based writer and analyst with a focus on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. She is currently a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Kennan Institute. Previously, she served as a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellow, a role in which she provided strategic communications guidance to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry.

Her writing has been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Foreign Policy and others. Nina received her MA in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies from Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where she was a Title VIII and FLAS scholarship recipient, and her BA in Russian and Political Science from Bryn Mawr College, where she graduated magna cum laude.

She has lived and worked in Russia and Ukraine, and speaks fluent Russian and proficient Polish and Ukrainian. Nina was a 2017 Foreign Policy Interrupted Fellow.

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