Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. It's easy, tempting even to sort of

hand-wave away the problem of online harassment as just being people talking trash online.

You know, it's just words, so to speak. But we all know, it's not just words, right? It never

really is. A new book called How to Be a Woman Online from researcher Nina Jankowitz digs into how women are far more likely to be impacted by online harassment than men. And while her book does have some tools and tips for individuals to deal with harassment, she makes

an argument to NPR's Michelle Martin that it's not a problem individuals can solve.

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new new show, Sources and Methods. NPR

reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people helping you understand why distant

events matter here at home. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get

your podcasts. On their own. As you've probably heard, the tech titan Elon Musk has launched a hostile bid to take over Twitter. The social media platform favored by many politicians, celebrities, and journalists. That's because he says he's a free speech absolutist. And he says the platform now has too many rules about what people can say. But our next guest says there's a group of people who are essentially censored on social media right now,

women, especially women of color and public-facing women, because of the vicious, sexist, and racist abuse they're subjected to online.

Nina Jankow, which is known for her research on online disinformation and its effect on

democracy, her latest book is called How to Be a Woman Online. It describes in disturbing detail

the vastly disproportionate attacks that women face compared to men when they try to have an online

presence. And she's with us now to tell us more. Nina Jankowicz, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. All right. Give it to me straight. How bad is it? Give us some parameters about how to

think about this. Well, you know, it's hard to put a number on things because it's hard to detect

this harassment a lot. The harassers online are quite creative in the ways that they harass women.

But when my team at the Wilson Center sought to document some of the harassment during the 2020 presidential campaign,

over a period of two months on six social media platforms, we found over 336,000 pieces of gendered or sexualized abuse and disinformation directed

at just 10 U.S. candidates.

And most of that was directed at then vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris,

...