(cache)‘Mass misogynistic cyber attack’: International media coverage of our abuse

“X is hosting, facilitating, enabling and broadcasting this mass global misogynist cyber terror attack ... it works to protect the abusers"

Britain's LBC news and media website has written about the organised harassment and abuse against us, quoting Movement Director Melinda Tankard Reist and Campaigns Manager Caitlin Roper. Read the full piece here.

By Josef Al Shemary

Campaigners got 20,000 online games taken down after discovering violent games with themes of rape, incest and child abuse. Now, they are the targets of a global storm of online sexual abuse.

Warning: This article contains descriptions of violent abuse against women.

Earlier this year a campaign run by Collective Shout, a lobby group fighting against violence against women and girls, exposed thousands of online video games with themes glorifying rape, incest and misogyny.

But when their campaign successfully got the games taken down, they became targets for thousands of gamers - mostly men - enraged that they couldn't play their violent games anymore.

The online abuse they have faced since then has been "like a tsunami', they told LBC.

“It unleashed the hounds of hell, a tsunami of abuse, a mass global misogynist cyber terror attack against myself and my team,” said Melinda Tankard Reist, co-founder of Collective Shout.

“And we are now entering week eight, week eight of this unrelenting attack upon us,” she added.

The women described being sent graphic AI-generated images of women in violent scenarios, child sexual abuse material, or threats against their families and children.

Some users have been trying to hack their bank accounts and even asked X’s AI chatbot Grok where they live and where they get their coffee in the morning.

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“It's been relentless,” Caitlin Roper, campaigns manager for Collective Shout said. “We've just been getting really extreme rape and death threats, detailed threats about the ways they want to kill us.

“I'm getting messages, tweets with images of weapons like guns and knives, and detailed descriptions of how they intend to use them on me. I'm being sent violent porn depicting women being tortured and strangled, saying, ‘this is what we're going to do to you.’”

“A couple of weeks ago, I received an image of me that was doctored and my face had been blown off. Yeah, that's probably the worst thing I've ever seen in my life,” she continued.

Both Melinda and Caitlin described seeing images of their faces edited onto porn, receiving daily rape and death threats and being called misogynistic slurs.

“X is hosting, facilitating, enabling and broadcasting this mass global misogynist cyber terror attack,” Ms Tankard Reist said.

“It works to protect the abusers,” she added. “It does not work to protect women like us. And this has a chilling effect on women who are in the public domain, who are activists like we are.”