How Women Can Take Back the Internet

On Sunday, as allegations against former Hollywood kingpin Harvey Weinstein continued to mount, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted a suggestion: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too.’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” Milano got more than 65,000 replies. Since then, the phrase has been used more than a million times on Twitter, according to the social-media research firm Texifter, and more than 6 million people have posted about it on Facebook.

The campaign is just one way that women and allies can turn the internet -- a space where women are regularly targeted and harassed -- into a tool for combating misogyny. According to a 2017 Pew study, men are slightly more likely than women to report being harassed online, but women are far more likely to describe online harassment as a “major problem” and are more than twice as likely to say they’ve been targeted because of their gender. The #MeToo campaign shows that women can use the internet to fight back.