Seyi Akiwowo - How to Stay Safe Online: A digital self-care toolkit for developing resilience and allyship

Seyi Akiwowos work to make the online world safer, especially for Black women, is not only powerful, its necessary

Nova Reid, anti-racism activist and author of The Good Ally

Seyi Akiwowo is a force of nature and this book is a godsend. She exposes the depth and urgency of the online abuse crisis, explores the hypocrisy and inefficacy of tech companies and government, and explains what readers can do to improve their online lives. Accessible, empowering and potentially life-changing, this is a book everyone should read

Laura Bates, author of Men Who Hate Women and Girl Up, and founder of the Everyday Sexism Project

I wish the Internet was a safer place, but until that day comes, this helpful book is a crucial companion. How wonderful to have Seyi on our side as we navigate through the stormy seas of the online world which she, sadly, knows all too well. The brilliant tools in this book will help you set better boundaries, protect your mental health, be a better digital citizen, and in general look after ourselves and each other

Emma Gannon, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Multi-Hyphen Method

Seyi Akiwowo is the founder of Glitch, a UK charity making digital spaces safe for all by ending online abuse. Before setting up Glitch, Seyi was elected as the youngest Black female councillor in east London at the age of twenty-three.

A graduate of the London School of Economics, Seyi spoke on Fixing the Glitch at TedxLondon in 2019 and appeared on Wireds front cover as their top Changemaker of 2021.

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First published by Penguin Life in 2022

Copyright Seyi Akiwowo, 2022

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Text design by Alice Woodward

Cover image credit Leah Jacobs-Gordon

ISBN: 978-0-241-53522-6

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

To Oluwaseyi Akiwowo, the seven-year-old girl who had to grow up fast to survive a cruel world, and to twenty-six-year-old Seyi, who weathered a dark and scary storm of online abuse.

We are now thriving!

x

Picture this: its an early morning in February. A young Black woman is on a treadmill, pleased with herself for still being committed to her New Years resolution. After she takes an obligatory #gymselfie at the very same leisure centre where she learned to swim and took part in secondary-school PE, she puts in the earphones connected to her phone and presses play on her gym playlist. The next song up is a club banger, Work by Rihanna (featuring Drake). But, strangely, the song keeps dipping in and out. Confused and distracted, the young woman pauses the treadmill. She picks up her phone to investigate, ready to complain that her Spotify Premium subscription isnt providing a premium service at all. She freezes. A crushing wave of panic and then denial crashes over her as she watches a waterfall of notifications cascade down the screen. She manages to catch some of the previews:

Ni**a.

A talking ape?

Which STD will end your miserable life?

Ni**eress.

I hope you get lynched you nog.

Slit your clitoris.

hahahahahaha eat shit

The leisure centre until moments ago a place full of joyful childhood memories feels immediately unsafe. She looks around, panicking, unsure of who to speak to, who can help, unclear of what to do next, all while frantically wondering what she has even done wrong.

That young Black woman is me.

I wish I could say this is the plot of a Netflix drama Ive made up to help you better understand the impact of online abuse. But it isnt. Its a snippet of my story. I was elected as East Londons youngest Black female councillor in 2014, and this my first unprepared reckoning with online patriarchy and white supremacy happened three years later. A video of my speech at the European Parliament had gone viral, and with that attention I became the subject of peoples unfiltered hatred. I experienced very real, very serious threats to my safety and well-being. The cold and lonely sense of powerlessness was overwhelming. After that painful experience, I ambitiously (and naively) began campaigning to hold tech giants accountable for the millions of women facing or fearing online abuse.

Like most people thrown into the dark side of the internet, I was largely ill-equipped to handle it. My loved ones didnt know what to do or how best to support me. They made well-meaning suggestions to delete my account or make it private, rather than focusing on what was and still is a massive, systemic and global problem: online abuse. One thats going ignored or is actively swept under the rug by social media platforms. One that is nowhere near the top of the political agenda, despite the significant impact online abuse has on democracy, social cohesion, security, human rights and peoples well-being.

I became a survivor of online violence at a time when there was even less support than there is now for those finding themselves in my situation, let alone a young Black woman with a confident voice. The poor response from society, law enforcement and other people in politics was to say:

Bear with it.

Its part of the job, just ignore it.

This is what its like to be a woman in public life.

My story is just one in a sea of millions. This abuse is pervasive and happens in every corner of the internet, and yet theres little help for victims. Step one of solving this is to equip ourselves and those around us with knowledge and support, and to reimagine our experiences online and with each other and this book aims to provide you with those tools.

Online abuse happens far more than it should. And far more often than a lot of people realize: almost half of internet users in the US have personally experienced online harassment, with 27 per cent reporting to have experienced severe forms such as physical threats, sexual harassment, stalking and sustained harassment. According to Amnesty International, it happens to a woman every thirty seconds on Twitter alone, and according to the United Nations, women globally are twenty-seven times more likely to be harassed online than men.

Online abuse towards women which falls under the umbrella of online gender-based violence (OGBV), which also includes the violent experiences that non-binary, trans and intersex communities face is an extension of the offline, and too often physical violence many women disproportionately face. But, sadly, the data is still limited. When experts talk about online violence, they are often narrowly focused on the cyberbullying of young people. Its as if somehow magically we develop superpowers and are no longer susceptible to online bullying after our eighteenth birthday. Or they use language that prioritizes a limited, masculine, heterosexual, white-privileged viewpoint, which both erases and others the experiences of minoritized communities.