Online Safety Tips for Women

Hi, this is Lindy Kyzer with ClearanceJobs.com and welcome. With the rise in disinformation, there has also been a rise, I would say, in interesting online activity, especially related to women in the national security space. A timely topic for me now, and I happened to be lucky enough to come across Nina Jankowicz and her book  How to be a Woman Online. I’m always excited when I find a resource that’s both timely and super relevant and helpful around this topic. So I really appreciate your taking the time. Nina is an internationally recognized expert on disinformation and democratization, has a huge breadth of knowledge that is far outside the scope of even what we’ll talk about today. So I really, again appreciate your time, Nina, and your willingness to chat with me specifically about this book, How to Be a Woman Online today – which is surprisingly tough.

Yes. Yes, it is. Thanks for having me, Lindy. It’s a pleasure to be here.

So again, I recently came across and read this book. It’s not a new topic. I think as long as the internet and the web have existed, people have found ways to use it to harass others unfortunately. But it certainly does seem like more and more women, especially in the national security community, as we find ourselves represented at higher levels within this community, there is just more harassment that happens online and it also just seems to be really hard to address. So I would love to tap into your expertise on that. Are we truly seeing a higher volume of online attacks, especially against women? And then do we see maybe systemic reasons why it seems to be difficult to address?

I think there’s a couple of things at play here. First is kind of our own cognizance of the problem. It took me a while to realize how messed up it is that me and my female colleagues get a completely different tone, tenor quantity and quality of abuse than our male colleagues who are doing the exact same thing. And I think there’s this narrative in national security particularly or in politics more broadly, that if you can’t take the heat, you got to get out of the kitchen. And that’s just nonsense. It shouldn’t be a cost of doing business to have to deal with ridiculous, misogynistic, vitriolic abuse online. And I think we need to call that out. I think there’s also, especially lately, especially over the past year or so, there’s this content moderation of censorship narrative that has started to prevail that any sort of content moderation that’s happening online is actually censorship and that people are allowed to express their opinions.

(02:48)
But these are opinions that if they express them to you and me on the street, we would probably be able to get a restraining order against them. These are often violent, really misogynistic or threatening statements that people are emboldened to make online, partially because of the anonymity that online interactions provide, but also because it’s become quite normalized to make these sorts of statements in our body politic today. And so I think we need to call that out as well. And that’s one of the reasons I wrote this book to help women recognize, A, it’s not normal, and B, we have to stand up for ourselves, call it out when we see it and really hold our digital ground.

Yeah, no, I love that. I think there was something about how when you know something’s happening to you, you’re less likely to get upset about it. It was almost seeing things happen to my peers that I had this reaction, but then it enabled me to kind of vocalize, oh, this similar thing has happened to me and that community around that, which you also speak to in the book, but that’s a really powerful thing too. I think we have a tendency to want the focus to be on our work rightly, and not to take away from that by spotlighting this online abuse that’s happening, but then if you never share it, then you sometimes don’t realize what’s happening to other people around you. So the community element of it, which you referenced there, I mean that’s super powerful and important. And then I love that the book also has a lot of practical advice and gives different avenues to pursue. I think as a victim you tend to feel unempowered. So I appreciate anytime that there’s kind of a resource like this that says, Hey, this is your own story. This is what some people have done. This is what are some other examples. But there’s no one size fits all approach. And why do you think that’s particularly the case for online abuse and harassment?

It’s a little bit like dealing with stress, right? Some people go to yoga, some people go to kickboxing. Similarly, when we’re dealing with stress, people are going to have different levels of comfort for how they address things. A parent is going to react differently than somebody who doesn’t have kids or somebody who’s located on a different continent necessarily. Some people are going to lock down their ENC cats. Some people are going to engage in flame wars. I personally wouldn’t recommend either of those two tactics, but it’s all about who you are as a person, your level of comfort in reaching out to people, your level of comfort in speaking out and putting yourself out there and your personal kind of sense of engaging online. I personally love to use humor to call out some of these things because it kind of diffuses the tension a little bit.

(05:01)
It flips the script back on some of the people who have been trying to push me out of public life or push me out of the spotlight and says, you’re acting like a ridiculous little child. And it also at the same time educates some of the people who follow me. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are times where I engage with this in a very serious way. I got, for instance, a couple of weeks ago, a really abusive message when I launched my new website through my contact form. And I posted that and I talked very seriously about how the choice before me was either to allow people to continue to send me abuse like this through my contact form in order to leave myself open to opportunity or to close that contact form off and then lose that opportunity of media hits of potential for collaboration of people who just want to reach out and say hi. And that’s the fork in the road that faces that many women in our space face. And I just want folks to understand kind of the extra weight that it has on all of our shoulders when we’re dealing with that on a daily basis. So again, different ways to approach it. Sometimes through humor, sometimes through a very serious post, some people will just shut their account down. That’s fine. It’s all personal and it’s about what allows you, again, to continue holding that space and putting your voice out there.

Again, it’s going to be an individual approach, and having respect for the different approaches people take is really important. I also appreciate that the book outlines that companies should, I think, feel some personal responsibility for their employees who are engaged in this space. And if you’re putting yourself out there for your company, and then that’s leading to online harassment and there are steps that companies can take. And I think I have been very supported by my company and I very appreciate that, and I think they know I’m kind of out there maybe more than they would prefer sometimes. And so because of that, people unfortunately response sometimes negatively, and again, this online harassment, misogynistic activity that is out there on the web is a problem. Can you speak to that? What are steps that companies can take and how should companies help protect their employees in this space?

This is a really important point because personally, I went through an experience where I was a political appointee in the Biden administration, and I thought the USG was caught really flat-footed with how they responded to the harassment and abuse that I was getting, even on a very, very basic security level. So I think the first thing to recognize is that employees need to know in advance what’s available from their employers When this happens. We need to have policies proactively ready to go, and I’m happy to say that I’ve just instituted one at my own company. This should include things like anti-D, doxing protection. There are programs that you can subscribe your employees to proactively. Again, this is not something that’s going to work in the moment, so make sure you’ve got it set up before the proverbial S word hits the fan, right? So anti-D doxing protection companies like Delete Me or Canary are great places to start.

(07:39)
You might want to have a temporary relocation policy set up for your employees. So if they do get docked or if there was swatting at their residence, for instance, they and their immediate family members could be temporarily relocated to a hotel or another safe location until the threat passes. You might want to consider giving them support with law enforcement reporting instances of cyberstalking or other threats, making police reports, assigning somebody to temporarily take over their account for screening and reporting of threats. And then also mental health support, right? Take a look at your health insurance policies and make sure that includes some good mental health support, some robust therapy options for your employees, because I can tell you from experience, my therapist is the only person I talked to about some of this stuff, it’s gets weighty and you don’t want to constantly be putting that on your spouse or your family members.

(08:29)
The final point that I’ll make is we talk about this as women who are getting out there who are expressing their voices for their companies, but increasingly, particularly in the national security space, there are just working level employees who aren’t necessarily spokespeople or heads of mission or things like that, that are getting dragged into these unfortunate kind of conspiracy laden vitriolic campaigns online. And I think we have to recognize that this isn’t about the people who are out in front. It’s sometimes about support staff as well. So making sure that everybody is up to date with their security protocols and that they know what’s available to them under their company’s counter harassment policy is crucial as we head toward probably what is going to be a really difficult year full of a lot of these conspiracies and campaigns.

I wanted to highlight this topic. I do think if you are anyone working in the national security space, quite frankly, but especially if you are a woman in the national security space, we are going to come up against this disinformation issue, which is your topic of expertise. It makes a lot of sense that you were an expert on this because there’s just so much out there around, I hate to say it, the deep state and people kind of questioning national security folks who are working in national security. And I think that the online harassment is only just going to increase, and I think there is as we head into an election. So being proactive and understanding that we need to combat both, right? Combat disinformation so people know the reality what’s happening, but not everybody working in national security is a part of this deep state apparatus.

(09:56)
They’re not out to control the elections, and we just have to communicate that. And I think speaking of the mental health piece is big too. I do think there is something about the very personal nature of the oversexualization of the abuse that I think women uniquely experience, but pretty much any minority demographic or marginalized individual in the national security space, there is just something about they hit into that identity in a way that is very painful, I think to receive, but also somehow is not considered hate speech by a lot of the social networking platforms or other platforms. So can you speak to that? It does seem like this hypersexualization, it just taps into something, but yet also seems to fly outside of the radar of what any social network will go up against.

Yeah, I think it goes a little bit back to what we discussed before, that if you’re out there in the public eye, this is just seen as the cost of doing business and the cost of engaging. But the truth of the matter is that when men are abused, it is usually not in a way that calls into question their very personhood or their value as something other than a sex object or a parent. And I think also even when you look at the most basic gendered insults, the B word and the C word, those are used to demean. Those are used to belittle, but there isn’t really a male equivalent. And often actually a really cutting insult against a man is to use those insults that are describing women. I think that’s really telling. I agree that there’s just not enough recognition both in the tech policy space, but also in our legislative policy and infrastructure of the harm that is done to women through these gendered and sexualized campaigns.

(11:39)
And that is in part due the normalization of this rhetoric in the highest levels of our politics, we have seen members of Congress get called an effing B word on the steps of Congress. We have seen the President of the United States describe women in really demeaning terms, and now that is just seen as something that everybody can do, particularly when you add the anonymity of the internet into the equation, then things get quite a bit worse. I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that we are in an era of democratization of fakes, right? We’ve all been talking about this. We saw that Taylor Swift was recently depicted in non-consensual intimate imagery, a deep fake pornography. I’ve also been a target of deep fake porn myself. What some people might not know on this podcast in your listenership is that actually there’s no federal level statute that is criminal or civil, yet prohibiting the distribution or creation of deep fake porn.

(12:36)
And I want everybody to sit with that for a second and think about why that might be, because it just seems so simple to me. This is not something that is artistic. This is something that is violating somebody’s privacy. It can be extremely damaging. It’s happening to high school aged girls, and yet there’s only a handful of states that have taken action on this, and we’ve not had Congress take action. So again, I think this issue not being solved at the federal level belies that women’s safety and security is often not proactively considered and sometimes just simply not valued at all in these conversations. And so I’ve been doing a lot of work for the past seven years really to try to draw attention to this for the tech platforms. But as we discussed before, content moderation, trust and safety features, they’re all kind of rolling back as we head into this election cycle.

(13:22)
And so I think we all need to do what we can to raise the alarm bell. I would encourage everybody who’s listening to not only report the harassment and abuse that they are getting personally, but to be an active online bystander. And this is a term that comes from my colleague Seyi Akiwowo, who runs a charity in the UK called Glitch that is focused on ending online abuse against women and in particular women of color. And she says that we need to all make sure that we’re reporting when we see terrible things happening on the internet. It is so important to do that. It sends really good signals to the platforms that say, Hey, this person’s sending a lot of abuse today. Maybe we should take a look at that. Now, whether that happens to change anything anymore since all the trust and safety staff have been fired, not all, but a lot I think is a question that remains to be answered, but it’s still an important signal to send, and it’s a way that you can kind of express solidarity with the people in your field or in your circles who are going through this stuff online.

That’s a great point, and I think we can get so desensitize to it almost at some point that we were like, oh, it’s not going to do any good. I’m not going to do it. But again, that standing up for your community and seeing other people and having that volume, it is a simple step that you can take kind of in solidarity with other people and hopefully to kind of see some change start to happen on some of these platforms perhaps. But then knowing there’s just different approaches. I appreciate how in your book you talk about there’s different times when you had to step off if that for your mental health for other reasons. There’s just knowing that it’s not probably going to be a universal one size fits all approach for this, and there’s going to be different as harassment ticks up or you’re dealing with something very significant, you might need to take a different approach and then reemerge reengage.

(15:02)
But I think that too, that’s an important message too, that we probably need to work for ways to make sure that this doesn’t negatively impact women in their careers, which is a big issue for me with ClearanceJobs. We’re all about getting women into national security careers. Fortunately in national security, you don’t always have to be visible to have a national security career. So go into ClearanceJobs. You can have a password protected profile and be in that space. But there’s other areas, journalism, media, marketing, where you kind of do have to present in public. And then if you find that you’re getting harassment and negativity for doing that, how do employers kind of recognize that and say like, Hey, we need to look at these candidates or these individuals and say, this person might not be able to get the reach online that this person does, because doing so has a much higher cost for them.

Absolutely. And I think this has been a worry of mine as I’ve conducted this research over a period of many years. We see high profile women up to and including the vice president of the United States being hit with these horrific vitriolic sexualized campaigns. And I wonder what young women are thinking. They see these things. They see Kamala Harris being sworn in as the first female vice president of the United States, and then they see under it a bunch of misogynistic garbage. Are they going to want to pursue careers in politics? Are they going to want to make their voices heard publicly? And I’ve spoken to young women who said, I just don’t want a presence online that that’s public anymore. I don’t want to undergo that risk because they’ve seen what happens to women who do. And so I think we owe it to them to try to build a better internet here.

Yeah, I love that. And I love that message, and that’s hopefully a good takeaway from this conversation for folks who are listening who are in a position to change things or improve things. So we hit on it a little bit earlier, but I want to touch on it again. Again, we are heading into a contentious election cycle. I have friends on every side, so I love all of you. Let’s have a great conversation. It does make things dicey, right? I think it’s going to, especially in the national security space, I think it’s going to create more targets for folks just because we do have this deep state divide, which anybody who’s worked in the intel community could just tell you, this does not exist. Government is not that capable to be doing all the things that you accuse us of. We wish we were. Are there just other steps other than climbing into a hole? How maybe in this space can we engage over the next six months? I would just prefer to not engage on anything over the next months and see what happens. But that seems to be then just giving an avenue for all the crazy people to just talk, and no one will think that there’s any sane information that doesn’t even to help with our disinformation issue.

Well, and it’s also ceding ground to the people who are doing the abusing. One of the things that’s most motivating to me about getting out there and continuing to raise my voice about this stuff is that if I just took my yoga teacher certification and moved to Hawaii and taught classes under a banyan tree, I wouldn’t be doing any good for women of the world except for my clients who I was teaching. I want to make sure that we hold our digital ground. And so I think the important ways to do that as we head into this election year, and let me also just say this is not a left versus right problem. Gendered disinformation, gendered online abuse affects women across the spectrum. It affects women of all backgrounds and identities. This is just, unfortunately, it’s non-discriminatory thing other than being directed at women.

(18:16)
So that is not a political issue. It is something that happens to everybody, and I think that means, again, we need to come together to fix it. So as you’re thinking about how you engage, I do encourage you to do that and make your voices heard first. Do a sweep of yourself online. We’ve got folks who have clearances here. You know how to do this sort of open source work. Try to dox yourself, see what patterns of behavior you can establish from your social media postings, the ones that are public. Think about locking things down if you think that they might open up some sort of security problem for you in terms of people finding out where you live, if you’re posting from your favorite coffee shop on your way to work every day. That sort of thing is really, it can be really dangerous if somebody’s trying to follow you.

(18:56)
But also in the United States, we unfortunately have no personal data protection laws, so it’s really easy to dock somebody just based on public records. If you’re worried about that, and particularly if you’re in government and you think you might get swept up in one of these conspiracy theories, I would encourage you to look into a company like Delete Me or Canary that can help you stay on top of the mentions of you and your personal information online. And then also, depending on the jurisdiction that you live in, you can also approach your local records office and say, Hey, I’m a government employee. I’ve been a target of attacks before. Can you reduce my footprint online and take down my address? Things like that. You’d be surprised. They can actually be pretty helpful with that sort of thing. So think about that proactively, and then this might make you groan, but the easiest thing to do to make sure that your personal data, your text messages, your photos, other personal information that you might have stored in the cloud is kept safe.

(19:53)
Make sure that you have a password manager and multifactor on all of the accounts you can put it on. This is, I think, probably the only reason that some of my personal information didn’t get leaked when I was dealing with a crazy harassment campaign. It is the easiest thing you can do in my book. I refer to it as kind of set it and forget it, right? It means that your most personal stuff is not going to be leaked onto the internet if somebody gets be in their bonnet about you. And I think that is so, so important. It also means people can’t impersonate you, which as a Fed, that can be really problematic as well. So think about that stuff. And then I would also just say, think about the ways that you can build a community around your engagement online. Do you know other women in this space?

(20:36)
Do you have other allies in this space who, if the worst happens, can be there for you? Because let me tell you, without my friends and family around me, when the worst was happening to me, I don’t know what would’ve happened. I needed my girlfriends there to bring me lunch and chill out with me, or go get pizza together and get me out of the house. Things that either I was too afraid to do on my own or just I was so consumed by everything happening that I need somebody to physically take me out of that. So those are the three things that I would do proactively. There are lots more in the book, but those are the most important ones. And most importantly, I just think we all need to be engaging. Democracy needs our voices. It needs us to be expressing our opinions, and our democracy is more robust and more representative when women are expressing themselves. So I encourage everybody listening to continue to do that.

I love that. That was a fantastic takeaway. I know we’re heading into Women’s History Month, how to Be a Woman Online. I commend it to, I work with a ton of employee resource groups dedicated to women in national security. I feel like every company who has one of those should be buying this book and giving it to all of their employees and reading those together and taking those tips. And there is something about the community too. There’s simple steps for cyber hygiene, but again, especially I would say women are in underserved communities. We sometimes have so much going on. It does take that peer accountability to say, Hey, let’s get together. Let’s keep each other accountable and say, we’re going to take simple steps to improve our cyber hygiene because we’re going to need it heading into again the next six months. Let’s take some steps now to be proactive and to be safe. I so appreciate the work that you’re doing. It is so important and so encouraging. We do need more women in national security, and especially in mid-level, senior level roles, to stick with it and to be sustained on that career journey and seeing people like you committed to democratization, to combating disinformation, which is going to be so important over the next six months is really important. So I really appreciate your expertise in taking the time to chat with me.

It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.