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The reality of networked abuse
On a Monday morning in late 2024, Neel found armed police at her door. Someone had falsely reported a violent crime inside her home.
The 2024 US presidential elections had brought intense scrutiny to the Haitian community in Ohio, amid false claims that Haitians were eating pets. Neel was among several reporters who went to Springfield to hear firsthand accounts from members of the Haitian diaspora. The stories they published sparked a wave of hostile reactions online.
Neel recalled harassment emails that flooded her professional and personal inboxes. Even though she had taken measures to keep her personal information private, her home address was ultimately exposed.
“By the time Monday morning came around and I saw the police car, I wasn’t entirely surprised,” she said.
Neel’s experience reflects broader patterns documented by Shabbir. The data indicates that 75% of surveyed women journalists report facing online violence in connection with their work — a slight increase from 73% five years prior.
More critically, 42% of respondents reported online abuse escalating into physical, real-world danger, more than double the previous rate.
“We were already horrified that it was one in five during the pandemic,” Shabbir said. “So this is [even more] horrifying.”
The architecture of targeted abuse
Online harassment directed at women journalists rarely functions as a series of isolated incidents. Instead, it works as a deliberate structure designed to undermine credibility and force reporters out of the public discourse.
Shabbir categorizes these digital campaigns into three distinct types of abuse:
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Swarming: highly visible cyber-mob attacks where multiple accounts simultaneously target a single journalist across platforms, creating an overwhelming wave of public hostility.
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Large-scale attacks: Highly sophisticated, “institutionalized” cyber campaigns that combine different strategies like automated bot networks, hacking, doxxing (the act of publishing personal identification information, often online) and swatting (false reporting of a serious emergency, which often invites an armed law enforcement response).
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Networked gaslighting: Low-level, relentless forms of psychological manipulation designed to erode public trust and delegitimize a reporter’s work over time.
Of these, networked gaslighting is uniquely dangerous for its deceptive banality. It relies on persistent, low-level manipulation that weaponizes identity, intersectional background, and/or personal details to plant doubt in a journalist’s authority.
For example, when British investigative reporter Carole Cadwalladr was repeatedly labeled as a “crazy cat lady” by political figures during the Brexit campaign, the slur spread across social networks, quietly eroding public trust in her reporting.
Because individual comments in a gaslighting campaign appear minor on the surface, newsroom leaders frequently dismiss them as routine noise — even as the constant drip of hostility can inflict deep psychological terror.
“If a seed of doubt has been planted online where you’re not a voice to be trusted, that’s where those things really catch fire,” Shabbir said. “It has the same impact because you are making somebody fearful for themselves.”
Institutional literacy and real-world danger
When online violent campaigns cross into physical spaces, a lack of digital literacy among law enforcement can challenge journalists’ attempts to communicate that they are at risk.
When Neel tried to explain to the police officers who responded to the swatting call, they struggled to identify the offense.
“When the officer was asking me, ‘You’ve been what?’ and I said, doxxed, he didn’t know what that meant,” she said.
“The police themselves were not equipped to even know how to categorize this crime.”
When law enforcement lacks the protocols to officially file reports and track digital threats, it leaves journalists vulnerable, as the security burden often falls back on the individual reporter or newsroom.
The silent strain on reporting standards
The impact of digital violence extends beyond individual distress — it forces fundamental changes in daily journalism practices. To protect vulnerable sources and community members from online attacks, newsrooms are revising fundamental attribution rules.
Neel explains how online threats have altered standard reporting protocols:
“Our basic standard rule of journalism when reporting is you get the person’s full name, age, profession and the neighborhood they live in. We can’t do that anymore because that opens up people to harassment through our platform,” she said. “We’ve had to become more flexible about identifying sources without naming them in a way that others can track them down.”
Outlets are also increasingly choosing to remove individual reporter bylines on high-risk stories, adopting institutional signatures to buffer reporters from targeted harassment campaigns.
These adjustments, paired with a 50% rise in self-censorship among writers and public communicators, contribute directly to a shrinking public record.
According to Shabbir, more than a quarter of women surveyed for The Chilling reported self-censoring at work. The study highlighted the voice of Polish radio journalist Aleksandra Wojciechowska:
“I am afraid of people’s reaction to my work. I’m afraid of any mention of my name in the media. … I have that fear in the back of my head all the time.”
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