Nina Jankowicz Wishes She Didn’t Have to Write ‘How to Be a Woman Online’
The writer and former adviser to the Ukrainian government has experienced too much online trolling not to share what she’s learned.
This is 10 Questions, a column in which we ask tech authors to pull back the covers on their recently released books. Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Nina Jankowicz may be a former adviser to the Ukrainian government and a global fellow at the Wilson Center working on counter-disinformation programs for the Department of Homeland Security. But she also apparently has bags under her eyes. At least that’s what one man emailed Jankowicz after a recent appearance on the BBC. “I was like, ‘I don’t know, maybe it’s the pandemic, maybe the fact that I’m pregnant, or the fact that the country I lived in for more than a year is getting attacked and people are dying every day. I don’t know, it could be any of those things,’” she said a few weeks later.
Thankfully, she was able to follow her own advice from “How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment, and How to Fight Back.” “Instead of letting that bother me the way I used to, I just took a screenshot of [the email], made a silly comment online and got on with my day.” She spoke to The Information about the types of men she regularly meets on the internet (outlined in a delightful chapter dubbed “Troll Safari”), how easy it is for online abuse to spill over into real life and the soundtrack for some of her most inspired bouts of writing.