Offline Accountability
Counterspeakers don’t always limit their responses to the online world. When a stranger’s (or group’s) behavior seems sufficiently offensive, hateful, or dangerous, online observers sometimes reach into their offline lives to force them to change - or simply to punish them.
To do that, people who want to punish someone they don’t know rely on those their targets do know. Typically they denounce the target to someone with power over them. Most often that’s an employer, but occasionally it’s a parent, or when the target is a corporation, its advertisers.
In one example Alanah Pearce, an Australian game critic, realized that some of the people sending her rape threats and other online harassment were young boys, not adults, so she found the mothers of several of them online, and forwarded threats their sons had sent her. Some mothers didn’t reply, but when Pearce sent a screenshot of one rape threat to its author’s mother with a request that she speak to her son, the mother responded “omg, little shit. I’M SO SORRY. YES I WILL TALK TO HIM!!!” (Pearce 2014). In amplifying her conversation with the mother by tweeting it, Pearce issued a warning to other trolls and potential trolls. Her followers amplified the message further, retweeting it more than 42,000 times, and liking it more than 75,000 times. According to Pearce, the mother made her son write a letter of apology to Pearce and also went to her son’s school “to talk about online harassment and bullying and trying to make other parents more aware of what their kids are saying online.”
In many other examples, enraged counterspeakers contact their targets’ employers, and demand that they be fired from their jobs. They have often been successful - even when they were wrong about the facts. In 2018, for example, a video went viral of an employee of a U.S. fast food restaurant called Chipotle refusing to serve a group of Black men unless they paid up front. One of the men in the group recorded the interaction and posted it online, tagging Chipotle in the tweet. It was watched at least 7 million times, retweeted at least 30,000 times, and the employee was identified by name. Hundreds of strangers sent her harassing and threatening messages, including one from a person who said he would “burn her grandmother’s body and send it to her in a bag.”
Chipotle responded to the outrage by firing the employee and pledging to retrain staff at that store. Soon after, however, details emerged that cast the entire episode - and the employee - in a completely different light. The men in the video had come into the store on previous occasions, running out with their food before paying. The man who uploaded the video had himself bragged online about “dining and dashing” before. Chipotle offered the employee her job back. Bruised by the experience, she declined.
Sleeping Giants, a network of groups active in countries around the world including France, Brazil, Australia, and the US, is another example of using offline accountability to influence online discourse. Group members take screenshots of ads that appear on far-right news sites like Breitbart alongside content that they feel is hateful. They then share the screenshots with the companies being advertised, pressuring them to remove their advertising from the site. The groups are primarily organized through country-level accounts on X (formerly Twitter). At the time of writing (2023), the largest group in the network is Brazil, with over 575k followers (followed by
One more form of offline accountability is to respond to online content with a real world consequence that would appall its author, such as responding to a white supremacist by donating money to an organization that supports refugees. For example, when staff at a UK-based immigrant assistance NGO called Calais Action noticed an uptick in xenophobic comments online in 2016, they created TrollAid, a project where volunteers responded to anti-immigrant comments posted on the organization’s Twitter and Facebook pages with information about their organization and a link to a fundraising page, inviting people reading the comment to donate in the troll’s name. They also encouraged people to use the strategy on other anti-immigrant comments that they saw on social media. If the comment was made on the organization’s social media pages, they later returned to let the troll know how much money was raised in their name.
