As the ongoing, harassment-fueled controversy known as Gamergate rages into its second month with no sign of dying down, the Pew Research Center is out with new numbers on online harassment. They probably won't surprise you: 73 percent of respondents say they've witnessed some kind of threats or embarrassment online and 40 percent have experienced it, mostly in the form of being called offensive names.
Of course, that's the less scary kind of harassment. As Pew notes, "the second category of harassment targets a smaller segment of the online public, but involves more severe experiences such as being the target of physical threats, harassment over a sustained period of time, stalking, and sexual harassment."
That scarier kind of harassment is at the top of the headlines lately, because in Gamergate, the threats of violence have gotten so severe that a feminist video blogger last week was forced to cancel a speaking engagement after threats of a bloody massacre, and at least a handful of women who are targets of Gamergate have been forced into hiding.
[For more of this story, written by Elise Hu, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/allte...line-space-for-women]
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