The Humiliation of Katie Hill Offers a Warning

Decrying the bleakness of the online world is, at this point, something of a national pastime. But not very long ago, before the 2016 election, the internet still seemed capable of breaking down rigid structures of power and engineering a better world. And yet, underneath this cheerful veneer, it has always been a hostile place for the same people who are often targets of hostility in the real world.

Despite the utopian promise of human connection freed from the limitations of physical space, women online have never been able to escape being reduced to their bodies. “Tits or GTFO”—i.e., show us your bare breasts or leave—was for a long time the traditional greeting to a female user who announced herself on a predominantly male forum. In her book, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, Citron describes the case of the blogger and programmer Kathy Sierra, who was effectively driven off the internet in 2007 by a coordinated, cross-platform harassment campaign. She also chronicles the many, many women whose lives have been damaged by nonconsensual pornography.

This ugliness seemed to metastasize and consume the internet as a whole after 2016. Many of the issues major technology companies are struggling with now—the presence of harassment; the existence of bad actors seeking to game the system, whether to promote hate speech or interfere in an election; the problem of users abandoning platforms plagued by trolls—have always been there, but were primarily hurting populations whose concerns were much easier for tech firms to write off.

Read more: The best weapon against revenge porn is copyright law

Katie Hill’s story is a vivid illustration of the connection between these older harms and their newly visible scale. She is the victim of nonconsensual pornography, apparently at the hands of a former partner she describes as abusive, and much of the glee over her departure seems motivated by a familiar distaste for women in positions of authority—so far, so typical.

Yet her case is also very new in what it says about the poisoned state of the American political environment in an age of hyperpolarization and social media. The irony is that during her campaign, Hill, despite her self-presentation as a new kind of politician and her frank promises of holding power to account, seems not to have escaped the pull of unhealthy currents of power in her own personal life. In this, too, she is far from alone.

Having now left Congress, Hill has promised to devote her time to fighting nonconsensual pornography: “I refuse to let this experience scare off other women,” she said on the House floor. If she is able to lobby effectively for increased protections for other victims—perhaps including federal legislation against nonconsensual pornography, which Congress has so far failed to pursue—then perhaps something good will have come of all this mess. The American political system, including the media and large platforms considering questions of content moderation, will have to grapple with how to respond to the publication of similar photographs in the future.

But it would be a mistake to focus only on the larger-scale question of what nonconsensual pornography means for democracy and ignore what it means for the many people who are quietly harmed by it every day. If those people are once again pushed aside, as they were for so long, then perhaps the crucible of 2016 will have taught us little after all.

Quinta Jurecic is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and managing editor of Lawfare.