How I Hardened My Online Life (So You Can Too)
Don't wait until after a pile‑on or a hack to care about online safety—your 10 day tune-up is here!
The first time I was the target of serious online harassment, I didn’t see it at first—I felt it. I was in a doctor’s office waiting room when I noticed my phone getting hot in my pocket. When I pulled it out, my lock screen was filled with Twitter notifications about misogynist comments (RIP phone battery, RIP Twitter).
At the time, my public profile wasn’t huge; my first book had just come out and I had 10,000 or so followers, but I was being targeted by right-wing accounts that had hundreds of thousands. They were saying insane things about me. They claimed I was a psyop (I guess I have that in common with Taylor Swift?), or that I was transgender (a common line of attack against outspoken women). But most of it was just run-of-the-mill women-hating: criticizing my appearance, requesting sexual favors, instructing me to make the unwashed, anonymous, male masses a sandwich. I fought back, which made them angrier.
It was a formative experience for me, driving my interest in quantifying what abuse looked like and qualifying its impact. I ran a study for the Wilson Center and found that over 336,000 pieces of abusive content were targeted at just 13 women running for office during the 2020 election cycle. Women of intersectional backgrounds—who happened to be gay, or Black, or Latina, or another identity—faced more, and worse abuse. I’ll never forget some of the ways our focus group participants described what they had been through. They told us things like: “you don’t feel safe to continue speaking, so you don’t speak.”
Women were self-censoring because men couldn’t restrain themselves from expressing every vile thought they had directly to the women they were about; we actually confirmed that men preferred to yell at their targets rather than just about them. Platforms were failing women, too—their enforcement of their own terms of service was spotty at best and non-existant at worst.
From then on, I became an advocate for targets of online abuse. I didn’t want others to deal with what I had experienced and studied. I wrote another book, How to Be a Woman Online. I taught workshops on online safety for women as far flung as Belarus and Mexico.
I dealt with a second, much worse round of on- and offline abuse that is following me even today. But when anonymous trolls on message boards were trying to hack my devices, when they were threatening me, when they were discussing how to cause me physical harm, a security consultant I worked with told me: if you didn’t have such a good security posture, this would have been much worse.
He was right: I’ve spent most of my career shoring up my digital footprint. I’ve been targeted by Russian hackers, MAGA trolls, cyberstalkers, and creators of deepfake nudes, and traveled and lived in places where state surveillance is the norm.
I had already dedicated a lot of my career to helping women hold their digital ground, but having put the skills I’ve developed through the ringer, I knew at that moment I would always take great joy in sharing them with others.
Unfortunately, I encounter people in every corner of the world who think that basic cybersecurity precautions “aren’t for them.” They think because they’re just a normal person, with a normal job, hackers and scammers aren’t trying to access their information, steal their identities, or worse—discourage them from participating in public life. That’s not true.
It’s also not true that you need a certification in cybersecurity to be measurably safer online. That’s where the 10-Day Online Safety Tune-Up comes in. Over the next ten days, you will take concrete steps to deepen your digital defenses, so that if the worst happens, you won’t be left wondering what to do. You’ll be safe in the knowledge that you took proactive steps to blunt the impact of harmful digital campaigns with The Wayfinder. 🧭