Quoted Text

Bile, venom and lies: How I was trolled on the Internet
As it happens, in recent weeks I (Fareed Zakarian) was the target of a trolling campaign and saw
exactly how it works. It started when an obscure website published a post titled “CNN host Fareed
Zakaria calls for jihad rape of white women.” The story claimed that in my “private blog” I had
urged the use of American women as “sex slaves” to depopulate the white race. The post further
claimed that on my Twitter account, I had written the following line: “Every death of a white person
brings tears of joy to my eyes.”

Disgusting. So much so that the item would collapse from its own weightlessness, right? Wrong.
Here is what happened next:
Hundreds of people began linking to it, tweeting and retweeting it, and adding their comments, which
are too vulgar or racist to repeat. A few ultra-right-wing websites reprinted the story as fact.
With each new cycle, the levels of hysteria rose, and people started demanding that I be fired,
deported or killed. For a few days, the digital intimidation veered out into the real world.

It would have taken a minute to click on the link and see that the original post was on a fake news
site, one that claims to be satirical (though not very prominently). It would have taken simple
common sense to realize the absurdity of the charge. But none of this mattered. The people spreading
this story were not interested in the facts; they were interested in feeding prejudice. The original
story was cleverly written to provide conspiracy theorists with enough ammunition to ignore evidence.
It claimed that I had taken down the post after a few hours when I realized it “receive[d] negative
attention.” So, when the occasional debunker would point out that there was no evidence of the post
anywhere, it made little difference. When confronted with evidence that the story was utterly false, it
only convinced many that there was a conspiracy and coverup.