We interviewed 61 Muslims in 15 focus groups from the most visible Muslim population in the United States: the Detroit Metropolitan Area. Participants shared their experiences of and responses to Islamophobia on social media and face-to-face during the 2016 US presidential election campaign and aftermath. Applying Fraser’s and Squires’ theories of counterpublics, we developed an adapted understanding of counterpublics in collapsed contexts of online and face-to-face spaces. We argue that everyday Muslim internet users in the United States are an example of a hyper differential counterpublic. They face the pressures of near ubiquitous and ever evolving Islamophobic attacks, while needing to engage with the internet for personal and professional purposes. We suggest that hyper differential counterpublics operate in collapsed contexts of mixed, unimaginable publics, switch between group and individual responses, and craft hyper situational responses to discriminations case by case.
We conducted 15 in-depth interviews with women and men in Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Canada, and the United States who were victims of doxxing. The goal was to understand their experiences, their responses, and the consequences they faced. We understand doxxing as a complex, gendered communicative process of harassment. Doxxers use digital media technologies to expose personal information without consent given by those to whom the personal information belongs. We apply a feminist approach to surveillance studies to doxxing, focusing on the constructions of daily, habitual, and ubiquitous assemblages of veillances that disproportionately impact vulnerable individuals. We found that gendered aspects shaped the flow and suspected intent of doxxing and subsequent harassment. Victims experienced uncertainty, loss of control, and fear, while law enforcement and social media providers only helped in a few cases to pursue doxxers or remove unwanted personal information. We ultimately extend the definition of doxxing by considering the ubiquitous nature of information shared online in gendered veillance cultures. Our findings lead us to advocate for protecting the contextual integrity of entering personal information into expected, intentional, or desired spaces.
Doxxing (or doxing) is a complex, gendered form of online harassment that breaches perceived privacy boundaries by releasing information through online mass media channels, resulting in physical and online consequences for a target. Doxxing often occurs in conjunction with other forms of online abuse and entangles online and physical environments in complicated and gendered ways that differ on a case‐by‐case basis. While both women and men experience doxxing, women are more likely to receive greater amounts of unwanted, vitriolic, and sexualized messages, to be the targets of cyber‐mobbing or brigading, revenge porn, nude leaked messages, and receive unwanted sexualized items. The design and use of technology has become an important focus for feminist scholars as studies have demonstrated that they facilitate online harassment such as doxxing through a problematic developing trend toward eliminating anonymity online.
Islamophobia reached new heights during the 2016 United States presidential election. We applied the theory of intersectionality to 15 in-depth focus group interviews conducted in gender-separated groups with 61 Muslim participants (41 women, 20 men) in South East Michigan between October 2016 and April 2017 to understand the role of gender in their responses regarding Islamophobia during the 2016 United States presidential election and Trump's first hundred days in office as president. Both, Muslim women and Muslim men, labored to educate others about Islam online, but Muslim women emphasized their efforts to act as exemplars online of what it means to be Muslim in America more frequently and more strongly than men. Muslim women and men often used ignoring and contextualization as coping mechanisms as the number of Islamophobic messages online was perceived as overwhelming. The high amount and ubiquity of Islamophobic messages online has lead to a sense of futility and high levels of stress among young Muslims in South East Michigan, particularly for Muslim women.
In 2013-2016, we designed and implemented Wikid Grrls, a 10-week after-school workshop series to teach online skills to middle school girls in U.S. schools. We interviewed and surveyed eighty participants before and after the workshop. Girls' online skills and confidence in them increased for the duration of the workshop series. Participants expressed great interest in learning more, but media literacy programs at their schools emphasizing online skills were lacking. Using feminist theories and the reader-to-leader framework, we argue that such media literacy interventions bring immediate learning rewards for participants. Further, we conclude that media literacy classes that include online skills should become regular features in U.S. school curricula instead of being offered merely in voluntary programs. This is essential to narrow gender gaps in digital knowledge creation and sharing. Future research is needed to assess long-term benefits of media literacy interventions to teach online skills longitudinally to see if, and how, such initiatives figure into subsequent schooling and career decisions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.