It is a truth universally acknowledged that we live in an age of incivility, with coarseness enabled by the Internet’s immediacy and anonymity.
Still, one needn’t have the delicate sensibility or decorous manners of a Jane Austen character to be shocked by the violent response in the Twitterverse to, of all things, the Bank of England’s plan to put Austen’s likeness on the 10 pound note.
Feminist blogger Caroline Criado-Perez had lobbied the bank for a wee bit more gender diversity on its currency; prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, the only other woman portrayed besides the Queen, was being rotated out for Winston Churchill. Criado-Perez’s online petition proposed, as “suitable replacements,” biophysicist Rosalind Franklin or 18th-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
Austen, as Rebecca Mead wrote for , “seemed the most uncontroversial of choices,” having achieved “a status among the English rather like that of a cup of tea: cozy, restorative, unthreatening, and omnipresent.”
Apparently not, except the omnipresent part. Criado-Perez found her Twitter feed deluged — not just the usual torrent of profanities but explicit threats of rape and murder. “I’m going to pistol whip you over and over until you lose consciousness,” one Twitter user warned. “Wouldn’t mind tying this bitch to my stove. Hey sweetheart, give me a shout when you’re ready to be put in your place,” said another.
Labor MP Stella Creasy came to Criado-Perez’s defense and complained of Twitter’s corporate weak tea response. “Twitter tells me we should simply block those who ‘offend us,’ as though a rape threat is a matter of bad manners, not criminal behavior,” she wrote in the Observer.
The predictable consequence? The Internet trolls targeted Creasy as well. “I’m gonna be the first thing u see when u wake up,” wrote one tweeter, including a picture from the horror film “Halloween” — a masked man brandishing a meat cleaver.
Three men have been arrested for the online harassment. Twitter, which had taken a deliberately hands-off policy to policing content, announced stepped-up efforts to handle abuse reports and make it easier to flag problems.
Let us pause, gentle reader, to savor the irony of Austen’s choice provoking this response. Her characters inhabit a world of genteel decorum and entrenched convention, with rules of behavior as rigid and minutely choreographed as a Netherfield ball.
The closest they edge to rudeness are exclamations along the lines of “Nonsense, errant nonsense, as ever was talked!”
There is no pat fix for venom gone viral. The fault is not simply in our social media but in ourselves.
