When online abuse tried to silence me, I chose to make it visible. As a young activist and artist, I’ve faced years of trolling, misogyny and threats, simply for speaking out on issues like Brexit, migration and equality. Instead of retreating, I began transforming this digital violence into art.
When I started working as an artist, I was predominantly engaged in environmental and community arts projects in Sheffield and the Peak District, and not particularly interested in party-politics or campaigning. The Brexit referendum was my political awakening. On 23 June 2016, I became a political activist overnight, driven by outrage at the UK’s vote to leave the EU, specifically the way politicians had weaponised propaganda and rhetoric, which directly correlated with a rise in hate crime against migrants and refugees.
I dropped out of my BA landscape architecture degree, and threw myself into the Remain movement, using every creative communication channel at my disposal to warn that Brexit would damage Britain’s future and betray its youth. That path has reshaped my life. I’ve collaborated with grassroots activists, campaigns and NGOs across Europe, gained international media coverage and won awards for my campaigning work, including ‘Young European of the Year’ (2018).
Misogynistic online abuse
But participating in democratic debate as a young woman came at a heavy cost. Many of my social media posts went viral, breaking out of the echo-chamber after they were shared into far-right groups (such as Turning Point UK) and on the pages of alt-right influencers, including the former chief adviser to Nigel Farage (Raheem Kassam) and Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin).
That visibility came with rape threats, death threats, sexual harassment and misogynistic abuse, and sadly not just from opponents, but sometimes even from those who supported the campaign to Remain, who did not like my creative approach to activism nor a young woman speaking out.
The intention behind online trolling, especially that of a misogynistic nature, is to silence the victims into submission – and it works. A 2023 study by the European parliament found that:
“Female politicians and journalists experience higher rates of online gender-based and sexual abuse and harassment than their male counterparts. Due to self-censorship and the ‘chilling effect’, attacks on female journalists and politicians exert a negative impact on professional and civic participation”.
“Don’t feed the trolls”
The standard advice given by organisations such as the Centre for Countering Digital Hate is “don’t feed the trolls” – block and ignore them to minimise their engagement. But I have always found this quite unhelpful.
Firstly, knowing to block a troll is dependent on reading their hateful comment and there’s no way to unsee that, so the damage has already been done. Also, the ‘block and ignore’ strategy takes away the victim’s agency in an act of self-silencing that forces them to shoulder all the responsibility for self-preservation. The phrase ‘don’t feed the trolls’ sounds very much like victim blaming to me, and asserting that they should just ‘ignore’ the fact they have been abused, dismisses and invalidates their pain.
The strategy also fails to recognise the potential value that the trolls can in fact provide, in terms of generating engagement, broadening impact and galvanising a community of supporters.
Strategies for managing trolls
Over the years of my social media campaigning, I have developed a variety of alternative strategies for dealing with trolls.
First and foremost, I love to ridicule them back. One of my favourite tactics is to ‘spellcheck a troll’ by replying to their comment with a correction to their frequently appalling spelling and grammar.
Secondly, if they make a joke that is objectively funny albeit at my expense (this applies especially when they go to the creative effort of photoshopping a meme), I will banter back with them, because showing that I don’t take myself too seriously helps to humanise the dialogue and often endears the troll to me, thereby reducing their vitriol.
Thirdly, a strategy which I have found particularly useful when the scale of the trolling on a post has been particularly vile, personal or intense in sheer quantity, is to share a link to the post with my friends and supporters, who can argue with the trolls on my behalf. This strategy not only shows community support and reduces the feelings of isolation which trolling aims to generate, but it also means that I benefit from the engagement under my post.
Social media algorithms do not discriminate between positive and negative engagements, and I can personally thank my trolls for helping many of my videos to go viral, including one which caught the attention of a Sky News editor, who then invited me on to the programme.
The final strategy, which I would use only in extreme cases such as rape threats and death threats, is to report the post to the platform and block the account.
Hate crime and trolling
Trolling, as well as in-person hate crime, tends to come in waves and the trolls’ targets shift in response to current affairs. It is therefore not surprising that I was witness to a two-hour hate speech incident on a train, where a drunk man shouted transphobic abuse at a fellow passenger, shortly after the highly publicised Supreme Court decision to legally define the term ‘woman’ as a biological woman.
I filmed this incident and submitted the evidence to the police, as well as giving a witness statement, and the perpetrator was recently sentenced for ‘Use of threatening / abusive / insulting words / behaviour with intent to cause fear of / provoke unlawful violence’. Knowing first-hand the psychological impact of hate crime, I was only too happy to support the victim in seeking justice after this incident, but it is far more difficult to achieve retribution when the abuse is received online from thousands of often anonymous accounts.
Creating the ‘Hate Dress’
Personally, the most intense period of trolling I ever experienced was in 2019, when the Brexit negotiations were at their most tense and toxic. After a period of respite during the pandemic, I was again inundated with trolling around the time I was starting my MA degree in fine art in the Autumn of 2023. And once again, I chose not to be intimidated and not to retreat.
Instead, I turned the hate into art by creating the ‘Hate Dress’ – a powerful wearable artwork that confronts the reality of online abuse and the policing of women’s bodies and voices in digital spaces.
Over the course of a year, I collected screenshots of every troll comment I received, analysing and categorising the hateful narratives on my MA coursework blog, then painting the worst offenders onto strips of ripped canvas before stitching them into a garment. This transformed the anonymised digital harassment into a tangible, visual burden that, as the wearer, I would literally carry.
Deliberately oversized and worn over a hoopskirt, the dress asserts my right to occupy space, whilst drawing attention to how women are perceived and punished for existing online and in public discourse. The ‘Hate Dress’ became a protest and an act of reclamation, which I wore during public appearances, including a performance at the European parliament, forcing audiences to confront the normalisation of misogyny and digital violence.
It draws attention to how words that are often dismissed as ‘just online’ have real-world emotional and psychological consequences, inviting viewers to question their own complicity and imagine safer, more accountable digital communities. Ultimately, the ‘Hate Dress’ turns shame into strength, exposing abuse in order to dismantle it in a statement of resilience, solidarity and radical visibility.
Dismantling the hate
As the creative project developed, I frequently posted updates on my social media, thereby ‘recycling’ the hateful content to generate more online engagement. Although, the response to the ‘Hate Dress’ was overwhelmingly positive, I did receive some push-back for engaging with the trolls and drawing so much attention to their abuse.
This criticism mainly came from older men, who wrote their comments on my social posts, somewhat ironically creating an endless cycle of trolling. As my friend and fellow artist remarked, “That second dress is making itself, I see”. My intention was always for the ‘Hate Dress’ to be destroyed in a collective performance artwork at the end of my MA course, as a radical act of solidarity, dismantling the hate.
With support from my creative collaborator and wonderful friend Jeff Kew, we created two videos documenting the project. The first showcases the creation of the ‘Hate Dress’, whilst the second records its destruction during the Central Saint Martins postgraduate show.
Hate Dress: screening at Emergency 25
Both of our videos will be screened at ‘Emergency 25’, a free to access festival of live art and performance at Contact Theatre in Oxford Road, Manchester, on 27 September. For this performance I will be wearing a reconstructed version of the dress, made from the torn and ripped fragments from the original dress, which will be destroyed once again at the end of the show, emphasising the cyclical nature of trauma and recovery and the need for ongoing community support in the healing process.
For more information on the Emergency 25 event in Manchester on 27 September, visit this link. Tickets are available via a ‘pay what you decide’ model.
