“Is that really true?” read the giant lettering on a poster by a mobile phone provider at a Berlin S-Bahn station. I was waiting for my train. It was a cold, rainy, November 2024 – right in the middle of the escalation. Three weeks after our women’s rights press conference, which had been followed by a wave of digital violence the like of which I had never experienced before. Beneath the headline, in smaller print, I read: “Questioning is important. Because misinformation online is extremely dangerous.”
Misinformation online and digital witch-hunts really are extremely dangerous. They can destroy livelihoods – and democracies. At the time when I saw the poster, this was my own reality. Some years ago, in her brilliant essay It Is Obscene, the Nigerian-American author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote about a defamation campaign against her: “When you are a public figure, people will write and say false things about you. […] Many of those things […] you ignore. The people close to you advise you that silence is best. And it often is. Sometimes, though, silence makes a lie begin to take on the shimmer of truth. In this age of social media, where a story travels the world in minutes, silence sometimes means that other people can hijack your story and soon, their false version becomes the defining story about you.”
I am writing this text to share my story. I want to take a stand against all forms of dogmatism and authoritarian behaviour and contribute to the debate on how to prevent digital violence and protect ourselves against it. And I want to draw attention to the appalling injustice that many victims, particularly women, experience when there is no route to justice – when social media platforms refuse any responsibility, and when legal proceedings come to nothing because the offender lives abroad.