Words are strange things. They have no weight, take up no space, and can disappear almost as quickly as they are spoken. Yet a sentence that took someone five seconds to type can remain inside another person for years.
The person who wrote it may not remember it at all.
That is one of the cruelest things about words, particularly those typed anonymously online. Someone can create a burner account, write something vicious, press send, and continue scrolling. To them, it may have been a few minutes of entertainment. The person who received it may spend days replaying it, questioning themselves, or wondering whether the stranger behind the screen intends to do more than type.
Anonymity does not make words less damaging. It simply protects the person causing the damage from having to witness it.
We like to say, “They’re only words,” usually when we are not the one being targeted. We reserve the word damage for things we can see. A bruise can be photographed. A broken bone appears on an X-ray. There is no scan that reveals the precise place where someone’s sense of safety cracked after receiving a threatening message from an account with no name, no photograph, and seemingly no consequences.
That does not make the damage imaginary.
According to the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of American adults have personally experienced online harassment, and 25 percent have experienced more severe forms, including physical threats, stalking, sexual harassment, or sustained harassment. Among women who had been harassed online, 34 percent said their most recent experience left them extremely or very upset. These are not harmless words floating around the internet. They are words affecting real people long after the person who typed them has closed the app.
The internet creates a dangerous kind of distance. People say things online that they would never say while looking another person in the eye. They can insult someone, spread lies, threaten them, or join a group of strangers attacking them without ever seeing the fear or humiliation they caused. The screen does not remove the consequences. It merely hides them from the person responsible.
An anonymous account can also make one cruel person appear to be many. They can create new usernames, repeat the same lies, and manufacture the illusion that an entire crowd agrees with them. The recipient sees ten hateful messages. What they may actually be seeing is one deeply committed asshole with too much free time and several email addresses. The words are still real, though. A few typed sentences can force someone to reconsider what they post, where they go, and how safe their family may be. That is far more than hurt feelings.
Freedom of speech does not make cruelty harmless, and anonymity does not make it consequence-free. “I was only joking” is not a defense when no one else is laughing. “I was just being honest” does not transform hostility into virtue. If your entertainment depends upon another person feeling frightened, humiliated, or unsafe, the problem is not that they are too sensitive.
Of course, words can also do the opposite. A private message saying, “I saw what happened,” “I reported the account,” or simply “You are not alone” can interrupt some of the damage. Kindness may not erase cruelty, but it reminds the person being targeted that the anonymous voice attacking them is not the only voice in the room.
Words may not leave bruises, but they leave something. Typing them from behind an assumed name does not change that. It only reveals who needed a mask before saying them.
🎭 Charlotte
(You can read more about online harassment here: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/01/13/the-state-of-online-harassment/)