Can #MeToo Turn Instagram Into a “Grenade”?

As the #MeToo movement climbed toward a fever pitch late last year, it manifested in an anonymous, crowd-sourced Google spreadsheet that listed a dozen or so men in the media industry. The “Shitty Media Men” list, which contained accusations of everything from sexual harassment and rape to creepy office flirting and unwanted messages, had been intended as a space of solidarity for women journalists, but in the hands of the public, quickly became a weapon. And now, it has an equivalent on Instagram. For the past few months, @DietMadisonAve, an Instagram account operated by 17 anonymous organizers, has been publishing names of alleged harassers in the advertisement industry using the 24-hour, disappearing-message feature Instagram Stories. Its founders, who describe themselves as “ad junkies exposing Madison Ave sexual harassment & discrimination since Oct 2017, cuz HR won’t,” told The New York Times on Thursday that they had shared the names of 17 harassers, and collected 158 additional names that they’re vetting, via non-disclosure agreements and work histories, prior to publication.

Though the era of #MeToo ostensibly began with investigative stories in publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times, the conversations around these stories were magnified by social media. Thousands of women launched the viral hashtag #MeToo to tell their own stories of sexual harassment and assault, their fury eventually coalescing into a movement that has become impossible to ignore. As it has done with countless social movements, including, most recently, the West Virginia teacher’s strike, social media magnified the voices of individual actors and facilitated concrete collective action. Virality is a phenomenon distinct to the digital age, and it’s particularly useful when it comes to addressing abuse, bypassing avenues controlled by institutional gatekeepers, which are overwhelmingly skewed toward protecting the accused.

The creators of the @DietMadisonAvenue account argue that they’re simply modernizing the long-held tradition of whisper networks. “Women have always shared the names of sexual predators inside and outside of the workplace with one another,” they said in a document it shared with the Times. “We are just one part of how that’s now being done on social media.” But others argue that they’re abusing the viral power of social media by promoting anonymous accusations. The account went temporarily dark this week, just as a group of female advertising-industry veterans published an open letter on Facebook decrying its tactics. “The Diet Madison Avenue Instagram account has created a toxic environment of fear,” the women wrote. “By using anonymity you avoid any responsibility for the facts or criteria used in the judgments handed down, creating even more collateral damage.” Faceless, nameless accounts that serve as judge, jury, and executioner, the argument goes, are unhelpful for the movement, with the potential, in some cases, to target the wrong people. @DietMadisonAvenue’s Twitter account briefly speculated that Instagram had disabled the Instagram following complaints, or that it had been hacked. Instagram, however, said it “did not disable the account,” which reappeared online by early evening.

There is no small irony in the fact that as @DietMadisonAvenue and other movements make use of tech companies’ products to spread their messages, accusations of sexism and bias are still flooding in from the women who work there. At Google, where months ago James Damore penned an internal memo arguing that women are biologically ill-suited to jobs in tech, the culture wars have reportedly erupted, and the world of cryptocurrency, arguably the newest horizon in tech, remains hopelessly mired in sexist practices of Silicon Valley’s past. “If you were stuffed in your locker in high school, it’s hard to believe you can be part of the problem,” Emily Chang told my colleague Nick Bilton late last year. “But Silicon Valley has its own unique kind of harassment that in part stems from the fact that many of the people who work in tech have been in male-dominated spaces for so long.”

Harassment and abuse—particularly of women and people of color—remains an issue on the platforms themselves, too. Twitter received a mixed response when it aired an advertisement touting women’s empowerment last week, with many women pointing out that they’d been repeatedly disappointed by the company’s failure to act when they reported abusive messages or tweets. Others have posited that, though Twitter presents itself as a reflection of the public discourse, there are certain phenomena baked into the platform that make it uniquely suited to vitriol. “If you think of the experience of the generalized, systemic misogyny and racism of our culture as being bathed in sunlight on a scorching hot day, Twitter might say it’s just a mirror,” wrote The Atlantic’s Debbie Chachra. “But it’s actually handing out magnifying glasses that can focus the already painful ambient sunlight into a killing ray.”

In the continual struggle between the abusers and the abused, then, social media acts as both liberator and oppressor, its inherent facelessness offering each side a different advantage. Yet Twitter, at least, seems inclined toward a more righteous regulatory policy, with C.E.O. Jack Dorsey and other executives holding a livestream session on Thursday to address the company’s harassment woes. “You have my commitment,” Dorsey said during the session. “We will continue to show our progress and emphasize the show and not the tell.” It’s unclear what the result will be if companies like Twitter take actionable steps to bolster the abused—whether the balance of power could truly shift in their favor. But for now, the weaponization of extant platforms seems to be making an impact. “I’m sad that they exist,” Kat Gordon, founder of the 3% Movement, which seeks to increase the number of women creative directors in advertising, told the Times of @DietMadisonAve. “But I think the fact they exist is emblematic of something that’s really broken. Sometimes you need a grenade.”