Name: Dylan Shokar

Social Justice Group: 2022-2023, Technology: Free Speech v Hate Speech Online

Date of Fieldwork: February 22, 2023

Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):

Type of Fieldwork: Interview

What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?:

On February 22nd, my group and I interviewed the Jewish real estate agent Tanya Gersh. We initially requested her to give us a brief rundown of her experience. She said that she had been a victim of a troll storm. A troll storm happens when someone gains access to your profession, address and contact information and distributes it to a group of individuals who are motivated by hate in order to harass you. They might, for instance, search every website that mentions you, leave negative reviews, and wreak havoc on your internet reputation. Also, they can directly message you with hateful comments. Tanya told us that even her 9 year-old and 12 year-old boys were being harassed. Tanya was harassed by a man named Andrew Anglin, who was the founder of the Daily Stormer. The Daily Stormer was a website made to spread hate about people. I am using past tense because after the attacks against Tanya and her family in 2017, she went to court against Anglin, Tanya won 14 million dollars against the Daily Stormer and got it removed from the web. Tanya talked about how she had this naive knowledge of hate, especially antisemitism, because she thought that “as a society we had evolved past hate and grown more inclusive” ever since the Holocaust. However, when everything happened to her she described it as “An instant change, I was almost heartbroken”. When she told us her story, I was very shocked that people in this day and age still possess so much hate for others.