I want to say something that’s important for people to understand about online harassment. I have covered harassment on every major social platform. Writing about the ways tech platforms handle or enable harassment and abuse is a part of my beat. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/instagram-has-massive-harassment-problem/572890/

Saying people who have experienced harassment online are somehow “unqualified” or “biased” because of that is false, but more importantly only serves to silence female reporters, black reporters, LGBTQ reporters, and anyone from marginalized group seeking to cover the space.

Experiencing the way these platforms can be twisted and used for abuse first hand does not make me or other reporters covering this stuff “biased”, it means I have a deeper understanding of what people I’m often interviewing have gone through and the challenges they deal with.

If you only allow reporters who have never experienced harassment or abuse to cover tech, the only ppl you’re left with are white cis men. Women journalists, Black journalists, LGBTQ journalists should not have our credentials called into question because of the crap we deal with

Also, people who say “you’re biased b/c you wrote about how a tech platform is enabling abuse but not [X random positive thing that happened on the same platform]. It’s not my job to cover every single way a platform is doing good in the world. That should be the *default*

People should also realize that their positive experience on an app doesn’t negate someone else’s harassment or abuse on the same app. Just because u made a lot of friends on Facebook doesn’t mean the company shouldn’t take harassment, disinformation and extremism seriously.