Law Professor Talks Cornell 7, Doxing of Jane Doe & ‘The Burnerverse’

I actually did for many years teach self-defense,

and I do think that physical self-defense is a big part

of what women are going to have to,

and I wish that this were not true.

I really do think that that's one

of the most valuable things that women can learn,

is actually how to defend themselves physically.

From WIRED, this is the Big Interview.

I'm Senior Culture Writer EJ Dickson,

sitting in this week for Katie Drummond.

My guest today, Dr. Mary Anne Franks,

is a professor at the George Washington Law School

specializing in the intersection of civil rights,

free speech, and technology.

Mary Anne Franks, thank you so much for being here today.

Thanks so much for having me on.

I would say that I first started

hearing the term revenge porn in 2011 or 2012.

Obviously, technology

and how we talk about it has evolved a ton since then.

So for listeners who aren't as plugged into the work you do,

I'm guessing terminology like image-based abuse

or deepfake sexual abuse can seem sterile

or maybe just confusing.

Can you walk me through the evolution of these terms?

Like, why is it better to be so formal

about how we label them?

You know, one of the hardest things about trying

to talk about these issues is figuring out

the right names for them.

So we think about the term revenge porn,

which was used widely by,

you know, for lack of a better word,

the perpetrators of this.

It's the kind of term that is very evocative

and people mostly know what you mean when you say that.

But the troubling aspect of it was that it did seem

to be the name that abusers were giving this conduct.

Revenge suggests that there's something

that was done wrong by the victim.

The term porn was really difficult for a lot of people

because they thought of porn as being something consensual

as opposed to non-consensual.

But it is an ongoing struggle

because it is really difficult to communicate

what we're talking about clearly without falling into one

of these pitfalls of either sounding

as though we are blaming victims

or sounding as though this is more trivial than

certainly it is in reality.

Right, and the word porn kind of has

functioned historically as a shorthand,

but that's also kind of unfair to people

who make porn, right?

Like consensual porn.

This is why we originally landed on the term

non-consensual pornography, that's what we were trying to

emphasize was pornography itself, not a moral judgment,

but a non-consensual version of that.

I often think about the best term as being the one

that the audience that I'm talking to is most likely

to recognize quickly

and understand what we're talking about.

So for the purposes of what we're about

to talk about today, what are some good terms

to establish here?

I think that that's why image-based sexual abuse

does become a good term.

The way that sometimes at CCRI,

the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, we talk about it is

anytime you have a failure of consent at any level

of sexual expression or conduct, that's a problem.

So we're worried about lack of consent

to the actual sexual activity, that's one.

Then there's lack of consent

to being recorded engaging in a sexual activity.

Then there's lack of consent to having

that recording distributed.

And there is, of course, lack of consent

to being manipulated in an image

or a video, making it seem

as though you are doing something that you were not.

And so we can think about all of those kinds

of abuses happening.

Sometimes more than one happens at a time.

Sometimes we're talking about

recorded sexual assaults that are distributed.

Sometimes we're talking about consensual encounters

that were recorded without consent.

Sometimes we're talking about consensual sexual activity

that is recorded with consent

but was not distributed with consent.

So just to recap, last month,

a former student from Cornell University

filed a lawsuit alleging that in 2024, seven members

of a school fraternity raped

and assaulted her repeatedly over the course of seven hours

inside of their frat house.

Of course, that story's everywhere right now.

It sparked a national discussion about consent,

accountability, and safety, and rightfully so.

What I'd really like to focus on here though is the chunk

of Jane Doe's lawsuit that takes place online.

Basically, she says early that night in 2024,

one of the men who raped her also posted

an explicit photograph of her body

to his frat's Snapchat group

announcing that she was upstairs and available,

which was how other members of his fraternity even knew

to enter the room she was inside of.

In the most basic way, what makes the Snapchat component

of this story worthy of discussion?

Part of what we all know now

about the way the message was conveyed

was it was a reduction of a human being to body parts,

to speaking about a woman as though

she were her genitalia, right?

And so I think it's not just the image,

although that's a big part of it,

but it's also this casual reference to a human being

as this thing to be used

and a casual reference to a large group of men

who then responded not by thinking

that anything was wrong about any of this behavior,

but in fact rushing upstairs

to see if they could participate in it.

So it isn't just that kind of alleged assault

that is happening in real time.

It is also the idea that you can broadcast it

with the full confidence

that not only will no one criticize you for it,

but that this will be a further bonding exercise,

a further social validation exercise.

That's what's really chilling about it.

And the Snapchat element of it,

how does that sort of add

to the depersonalization here?

I mean, I think that the Snapchat specific platform,

is one that began as a way

to encourage girls to send nude photos

with the confidence that they would disappear

by this kind of premise that things would disappear

and therefore you wouldn't be worried about them leaking.

I think that same mindset kind of

really is why the platform has continued

to be successful in this sense.

It's this idea that it's ephemeral somehow,

one that almost gamifies what's happening.

Like, what sorts of stories have you heard

about bad behavior on college campuses that make you think,

actually, there is a fix for this?

We have been hearing about fraternity sexual assault

and not just fraternity sexual assault, college assault

that happens in many spaces, many places,

and not just on college campuses.

It is one of the experiences, unfortunately,

that is so common for women in particular

that whether they go to college or not,

they're very highly likely to experience it all the same.

But we do see higher concentrations

of especially these group assaults happening in places

that are male dominated like fraternities

and like athletic teams.

Let me back up and say these kinds of experiences

really show that when you take several men

who have had all the privileges

that one might want in a society and you put them together

and you put them in an environment where

the kinds of things they have been told

are special about them may be challenged.

And what I mean by that is college is sometimes

the first place where a very privileged male,

especially a privileged white male, might encounter

the attitude that he is not particularly special

or smart or interesting

and that it's going to create in that person

a pretty pronounced sense of cognitive dissonance.

And it's the kind of thing that he is going to want to

put out of his mind as quickly as possible.

And the easiest way to do that is to dehumanize

and to instrumentalize the very people

that he thinks might be representative

of his lack of specialness.

And so I think that's why you see

these male bonding experiences

at these highly privileged places,

in these highly privileged kind of bastions, fraternities

and athletic teams, that part of what they are told is

you are entitled to feeling as though

you are the person on top at all times.

Yeah. I think one of the things that has really resonated

with people about this case was

that it took place at Cornell,

one of the most highly selective

institutions in the country,

an Ivy League school, somewhere where you think

that something like this quote couldn't happen here.

And I think that that is one

of the reasons why this story has lingered for so long

and why it's horrified so many people,

just the level of privilege

and the level of access to education

that these boys have.

You would think that maybe they would think twice about

speaking publicly or speaking to each other in this way,

but education really doesn't insulate

anyone from misogynistic behavior at all.

And what's interesting is at Cornell is whatever punishment

was given out, essays or suspensions,

maybe it seemed unfair in the moment

to the guys that it happened to,

but it wasn't really punishment at all.

So are they even really learning a lesson?

You know, it's hard to know yet with ongoing litigation

what all the details are and what exactly happened.

And we know that there's obviously some kind of there there,

but what you were saying about is it surprising

that men in the context of these elite sort of

educational institutions would not think twice.

One of the first viral email incidents that ever happened,

you know, early days of the internet,

back in 1995 was actually

an email that escaped containment out of Cornell.

And it was for Cornell undergrads

who had written a list titled, I believe,

75 Reasons Why Women Shouldn't Have Free Speech.

And women was followed by a parentheses bitches.

And this was sent around by these four men on an email list,

a really early email list at Cornell in 1995,

and it went viral.

The 75 reasons included, I forget which number it was,

but one of them was, If she can't speak, she can't say no.

And that wasn't the only one of the 75 reasons

that was very reflective of that same attitude

of very casual sort of sexual violence.

Part of the reaction was this is shocking behavior.

The other reaction was boys will be boys.

This was just a joke. It's satire.

They shouldn't have been punished at all.

And you even had some individuals saying

that this is a violation of free speech

and that Cornell was violating the First Amendment somehow

by punishing them at all and expecting them to apologize.

Do you remember any of the other 75 reasons on that list?

A lot of them had to do with the fear

of a female president.

A lot of them had to do with saying

that women shouldn't be allowed to vote.

There were several others that had to do with

she shouldn't have to speak

because if she's performing oral sex properly,

she shouldn't be able to speak anyway.

What are some of the First Amendment questions here?

You mentioned that people were raising

First Amendment questions about that email.

Even if this is free speech, now what?

I think that the more things change,

the more they stay the same.

The First Amendment issue such that it is,

is that private universities are not

bound by the First Amendment.

And that means that if they say you can't say these things

or we're going to punish you for saying these things,

it might not be a good idea.

We might think that there could be other reasons

to complain about it, but it's absolutely false to suggest

that it's a First Amendment issue.

That's one.

And then when we're talking about public universities,

even when you do have an institution

that has First Amendment obligations,

they're not mutually exclusive with your obligations

to keep your students safe

or to impose discipline according to

necessary conditions of, first of all, anti-harassment

and discrimination principles

and for keeping general order on a campus.

So what I think we've really seen is the deliberate warping

of the free speech debate

that has really portrayed any attempt

to take sexual assault seriously

or to treat sexual assault jokes

as if they are quite serious.

We've seen that as being portrayed as censorship

and sensitivity and cancel culture and wokeism

and all of the rest of it.

It also reminds me of the conversation about deep fakes

and the conversation from a few years ago about

criminalizing deep fakes.

The argument against that from tech platforms was

that they didn't want to censor free speech.

And it just makes me think why is the autonomy of women

and what they want the freedom to do with their bodies,

why is that always what's at stake

with the free speech issue?

It seems like it's the first thing that's sacrificed

when we talk about advocating for free speech.

Well, it is interesting, right?

When you have a cultural emphasis on,

or I would say cultural fetishization

of an abstract notion of free speech,

one thing that it does, of course,

is it disembodies a conversation, right?

Somehow safety, physical safety becomes oppositional

to this supreme value of speech.

And that's troubling enough in itself.

But even on the kind of terms of free speech

as a debate itself, this really shouldn't have worked

because as has been sort of relentlessly documented

over the last few decades,

sexual assault has a tremendous silencing effect on victims.

It affects not just their bodies and their physical safety,

although truly that ought to be enough,

but it also means that they can't express themselves freely.

We're literally talking about situations where victims

of sexual assault are told that they can't talk about

what happened to them, that they're the ones

who are placed under gag orders, not the person

who allegedly assaulted them.

We're talking about them having to fear that they're going

to be threatened and harassed by either

the person they have alleged has attacked them

or their friends, and so they withdraw from their classes

or they stop participating in activities,

they stop expressing themselves.

Part of what we've tried to say

at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative for over a decade now

is sexual abuse is a free speech issue.

It silences people.

And when we allow sexual abuse to happen with impunity,

we are essentially saying we do not care

about women's voices.

We do not care about the number of women who are going

to decide that they can't be journalists anymore

or talk about the topics they want to report on

because of the abuse and harassment

that they're going to experience,

or the number of female politicians

who are driven out of political office

because of some ex-partner who's decided that he's going

to take a private moment and send it to everyone.

We're saying that we don't care about their bodies

or their speech, and that really should be

a free speech crisis that we're talking about.

In that vein, something I've really noticed

in the last few weeks is this thirst

coming from dudes online to learn

and reveal Jane Doe's identity.

What was it like for you watching this unfold in real time?

What was the precedent for it,

like, in terms of the other high profile cases

you've looked at where Jane Does have been doxxed?

And what about this case

and this particular instance

of mass doxing stood out to you as different?

Well, in some ways it was haunting

because of how similar it was

that we've seen cycles of this,

and not just ones that I've witnessed myself,

but ones that have preceded my own experiences.

But when I think about how in 2011

or so when revenge porn becomes a term

that people talk about,

the woman who founded my organization

who was herself a victim of revenge porn,

what it was like for her going public

and actually putting her face to the story

and the number of people who tried to destroy her life

because of that, we've just seen it get so much worse

and where there might have been some concern

to keep things within certain context, right?

Maybe there was some concern about this breaking containment

and becoming a mainstream issue as opposed to

an online issue, that no longer seems to be a bar

to anyone now, that once it becomes the blood sport

of this is a person whose story has ended up online,

the ability to just jump in or the desire to just jump in

and become part of it, there doesn't seem to be any sort

of countervailing force to say maybe you shouldn't do that.

We really seem to have removed whatever safeguards

or disincentives there might have been once.

They all seem to be gone now

and it seems to be the opposite.

You will get validated, you will get attention,

you will be maybe even just lauded for the fact

that you under your own name are in fact providing this kind

of entertainment, this kind of,

this online mob attack on someone.

And I think that is a little different.

Yeah, there's a kind of guy online who is so

wrapped up in like, the slippery slope argument

around free speech that if we don't protect it at all costs,

something much bigger is at stake,

even though the other side of what they're advocating for

is exactly what we're talking about.

What are these guys missing?

It's hard to know where to start with-

[EJ laughs] how to answer that question,

but they're missing a lot of things.

But the free speech argument really has gained

this kind of talismanic power,

I would say, in the last 20 years.

And it is kind of the Elon Mummification, right,

of the free speech argument

because once you had someone like Elon Musk saying,

I'm going to bring free speech back to Twitter.

I'm going to be the anti-censor,

and you see someone with that kind of power and influence

do exactly what everyone who has ever made that claim

about how I really care about free speech do,

which is to immediately ban his critics,

to immediately shut down any accounts

that were actually making him look bad

and to elevate things like people

who were posting actual CSAM, right

actual child sexual abuse material,

and just decide that those people should have a voice,

that was really, I think, what gave a lot of people

permission, right, to do exactly that, to say,

Whatever terrible self-interested thing I want to do

that might be criticized as misogynist or racist,

I'll just dress that up and I'm arguing for free speech

and I will just get away with it every time.

I'll be heralded as the worse I am,

the more I'll be praised.

And that was true before Musk,

but I really do think that there was something

about him in particular that just activated that

for a lot of people.

And now you really can't, in so many ways,

you can't convince men who are saying the same things

that men have been saying forever, right, about gender

or about race or about wealth or whatever it is.

You cannot convince them

that they're not free speech heroes,

that they're not just exactly what they seem like,

mediocrities who seem really upset

that the world no longer takes their mediocrity

as a sign of genius.

You can't really convince them, they really think

that there is something very special about them

and that they are the geniuses that people will ignore.

So I think that's a big part of this.

One of the things that I was really struck by

in watching everybody so gleefully dox Jane Doe,

I didn't see any of these tweets doxing the woman

that they thought to be Jane Doe get taken down

or even have notes appended to most of them

despite this policy.

Why?

I think for the same reason

that Trump administration does not mean when they say

We're going to return free speech, you know,

We're going to really fight for the First Amendment,

the same reason that that administration will then

just quite literally lock up

all their enemies and silence assent

and shoot peaceful protestors in the street.

Because what the loudest defenders

of free speech usually really mean is they are going

to put in place a system where everything they approve of

will have all the freedom possible to be expressed

and anything that they don't approve of,

they will mercilessly repress.

And it goes beyond hypocrisy.

It really is just the absolute conviction that you,

the special boy, right, really know what is true

and what is meaningful and what is nonsense.

And therefore when you make the decision

that this should be elevated

or you need to tweak your own algorithm

so that your posts get more attention,

that you have to resort to that, right,

that that somehow is freedom of speech,

but any enforcing guidelines against anybody else

that you don't like or that anybody who's being attacked

and that you agree with the attack on them,

that you can just let that happen

is because this is the universalization kind of problem,

that the conviction that you alone can see

what is truly free speech and what is not.

And that is what is so frightening about those people

actually getting control

because for a while that wasn't necessarily the case.

When you have someone like Musk have this kind of megaphone

and that kind of platform, it really does send a signal

to the entire world.

This is someone who quite candidly will say,

you know, he got Donald Trump elected.

He's got all the power in the world.

And so when he recreates what free speech is

and it satisfies a certain longing that many people have had

for such a long time to be able to be as misogynist

and racist as possible and not have to be called out on it

because they want to be able to defend themselves by saying,

No, no, no, you have to understand

what I'm doing here is really something very radical,

very free speech oriented.

And it is an old, old story.

I mean, both of the books that I've written,

The Cult of the Constitution and Fearless Speech

have documented how this has always been true about the way

that people interpret free speech in the First Amendment.

We tell ourselves as Americans that we love free speech

and we've always upheld it

and we've always allowed for dissent to flourish.

And you actually look at our history

and you look at how much every time

truly radical ideas were expressed,

and those radical ideas in America are the radical ideas

of racial and gender equality.

Every time those ideas have been expressed,

we have locked people up.

We have put lynch mobs on them. We have tortured them.

We have suppressed them.

That's our history, but we keep,

we, in this kind of elitist American sense,

keep telling ourselves

that we are actually defending something.

Ruby Kramer put out a story

with the New Yorker this week about Jane Doe's doxxing.

And something she covers are men who,

for one reason or another, got caught up in the crossfire,

who were doxxed too

after being erroneously associated with the men being sued.

And you see this with these stories all the time,

like, people in the wrong place at the wrong time

who haven't actually done harm

or people who happen to have the same first

and last name as the accused

and therefore get mistaken for them.

I saw that happen like three times

on X a couple of weeks ago.

My question is, what do we owe those individuals?

Like, obviously we don't want to see innocent people

getting punished for stuff they didn't do,

but sometimes avoiding that comes at the expense

of actual victims, right?

So how do we make room for both?

That is genuinely a troubling question, right?

And one answer is that the mob mentality

that social media platforms have made possible

is so destructive for exactly this reason,

that in the theme or in the kind of tune of saying

we are trying to protect all freedom of speech

and so everybody can say what they want,

they can name her if they want, it doesn't matter.

We have seen what that does to our environment, right,

what it does to our information environment.

It's not just that you get a lot of misinformation

and you get falsity, which you do,

but you also get this fury and you get this immediacy

and this unwillingness to slow down and fact check

and you get this weird confidence

that people online suddenly develop that they are, again,

uniquely clued into what's happening

and they have the conviction that,

Oh, I now know who this is.

So how do we undo all of that?

I mean, I think the answers aren't going to please people,

but I don't think that social media platforms

as they operate now are ever going to mean

that we can have a safe expression

of accusations like this.

Because if the mob is going to come after people

without any regard for whether this is accurate information

or whether this is a proportional response,

no one is going to want to speak out

and no one is going to,

I think anyone ethical is going to worry

that even if you do have good information

and you do have the right names, that you wouldn't want this

to become a mob phenomenon

because something terrible is going to happen.

If you want people to be held accountable,

but I don't think we should ever be enthusiastic about a mob

coming to someone's house or people getting swatted

or people's family members getting harassed and intimidated.

And it just seems like there's no way to calibrate that,

that the kind of blood lust that is just sort

of the currency of the social media platforms,

it's incompatible with releasing information like this.

So I think at this point, there really isn't any safe way

to release people's names

or their information about these issues without this being

the kind of inevitable result.

Last month, I published an investigation

into the Burnerverse, which has been very,

very active in the doxing of Jane Doe.

And essentially, the Burnerverse is a community

of college sports fan accounts, many of whom are frat kids,

who have made something of a recreational sport

out of doxxing young women.

And my story focused on a 20-year-old girl

named Maddie Kowalski, who had a non-consensual

intimate video of herself having sex

circulated at UF where she went to school.

And the video likely would've just been circulated

among kids at campus,

if not for these anonymous burner accounts, amplifying it

by posting it on X

and including her full name and her sorority.

It ruined her life.

She was nonstop harassed by text

and phone calls and social media posts,

and in the end, she briefly dropped out of college.

So Snapchat in the Cornell case

and the Burnerverse in Maddie's story, how, if at all,

are these two things in conversation with each other?

Well, I do think in both situations,

you've got an amplifier effect by an app, right?

There's the underlying conditions that we've always seen

prior to the technology that we know of right now.

We've always seen these tendencies of, again,

that kind of homosocial bonding, that kind of performativity

of masculinity for men for other men.

And that's that kind of impulse to treat women always

as lower on the hierarchy as men are

and usually in a sexual way

because that is the way that these things get expressed.

And particularly in fraternities or in athletic teams,

it's a kind of hazing process originally, right?

You make certain men, you treat them like women

and you teach them how to be abused, right?

And then you give them the power to abuse others

and you make it into essentially a bonding exercise.

And then what does technology do for that?

Well, then it adds a kind of performativity

and a kind of a spectacle aspect of it that is somewhat new.

So as opposed to maybe being a somewhat fleeting,

but also still potentially terrible event,

it's now something you can record.

It is now something you can present to others.

It is now something you can get an even larger audience for.

Now you can turn the entire internet

basically into your online frat.

And that I think is the really terrifying thing

about the story that you highlighted,

the fact that this isn't something that was ever easy

for a victim to deal with, right?

If it's your whole social circle, like all of your friends,

everyone on your campus, your entire town,

that was devastating enough.

Now it's the entire world, right?

Now it's the sense of absolute captivity to the online world

that has no boundaries whatsoever

and where nothing ever gets forgotten either.

And that's something that is incredibly,

it is just terrifying,

not only because we can see the results of it

and what happens to the people caught up in it,

it's what's being done to all the participants

and what is happening to their sense of humanity or empathy

or whatever they might have had,

that it's all being trained away

to become these kinds of participants

in this horrible online spectacle.

So there is something, and we've known for a long time that

that kind of mediation of the screen, of the app

has this corrosive effect on our ability to sympathize,

empathize, to see the humanity in someone else.

But you combine that with an already toxic environment

of male bonding and this attempt to retain some kind

of meaning in a world where increasingly men's mediocrity

is something they can no longer ignore in every other way.

This is where they go. This is what they choose.

They're going to make an example out of these women

so that they can feel better collectively

about the status of people like them.

So I think that that's what's bonding a lot of these men.

I think that's why they use social media.

I think social media is driving a lot of it

because it is performative.

The more you can perform, how much you are humiliating

or degrading a woman, the more of a man you are.

Social media is so often lauded for tearing down the walls

between states and countries and continents

and improving connectivity,

but it's also removing our boundaries

and increasing our sense of shamelessness

and making us think about ourselves constantly,

ourselves as brands, our own self-interest.

I guess what I'm wondering is as somebody who has

sort of witnessed the evolution of social media

and the de-evolution, the accompanying de-evolution

of how people are treating,

do you feel like people have just gotten worse as a whole?

Like, I kind of, as somebody who covers internet culture,

I just think that every single day.

Yes. Although I've also always been very much a...

I've always been someone who's been more worried about

what technology was going to do for us

than excited by what it was going to do.

I wrote my first apprehensive paper about cyberspace in 1999

because I was a college student.

I was freaked out by what I thought was going to happen

when the internet was on the way to becoming what it was,

which was that things were going to get

so much worse for vulnerable people in particular,

that everybody was going to become monstrous.

That was my fear in 99, and I used to joke about

how pessimistic I was, but now I think, well, no,

I think I was probably largely right.

And it doesn't everybody the same way, right?

I mean, it's worse for some people than for others,

but it's bad for all of us.

So we can talk about it as we don't deserve social media,

but also that maybe social media is just,

it's a punishment, right?

That this is what happens

when you don't care about boundaries.

This is what happens when you don't care about context.

This is what happens when you don't want

and don't believe that you need to be responsible

for your own communications

and that if people are ignoring you

or that you're not having the connections that you want,

that you should work on yourself

and you should try to figure out how

to have more meaningful connections to others.

Instead, you've got this cheap, easy social media platform

to tell you, No, I do deserve attention

and anybody who denies it to me is wrong.

And it just becomes this kind of expectation that,

No, people must pay attention to me,

not because I have anything interesting

or valuable to contribute, but because I deserve it.

That's a really terrible thing to do to humanity, I think.

I think the idea that we don't have to work

for our human connections is a terrible, terrible idea.

So the more that we are told that we are the stars

of our own story, the more that we are told

that attention is something we can game out,

the worse everything is going to get for everyone,

but particularly for people who are already vulnerable.

I think we talk a lot about how terrible everything is

and how the worst people are in charge of our platforms.

And I think what a lot of people want in these moments

is real actionable advice.

Like, yes, acknowledging everything is terrible,

but what would you tell young women in

or starting college about best tech practices right now,

like, in terms of their own reputational

and physical safety?

I mean, I would have that conversation,

but I guess what I would say first is I think about how...

I can't remember how many years ago it was,

but I had a friend, a former peer of mine

who worked for a college in my home state,

which is Arkansas.

And at some point, because of the work that I had done,

he reconnected and said, You know, we've had this

kind of spate of sexual assaults

by the football team at this university in Arkansas,

and we really thought it'd be great if you would come

and have a conversation with the student body

because this is really alarming that this is happening.

And I was really excited to do it.

And so we were making some of the plans

and he said, So you're gonna have, you know,

like an hour with the girls.

And I said, I'm sorry, who am I talking to?

And he said, Well, you know, we're going to have

all the female students who would like to come.

We have a big enough classroom for them.

And I said, I'm sorry, I think I should be speaking

to the football team, right,

because if you're telling me that you've got a spate

of sexual assaults, I don't know that it's the women

I need to be speaking to so much as the men.

And so we went back and forth on this for a while

and eventually he said, Okay, that's probably true.

And I said, I'm happy to do both,

but I really do think that the conversation

needs to be with the men.

So we got a conversation with the men first

and the women came if they wanted to,

but I said, They're the ones we need to be talking to.

So I think I'd partly say that one answer

to your question is we need to be talking to men

and we need to be holding men accountable.

And I know you know that, and I know that that's something

that all women know,

but then you also want to be realistic about

well, how can women keep themselves safe?

Because no matter how many times you talk to men,

does it mean that they're going to stop hurting women?

Probably not. So what can you do to protect yourself?

And this is going to maybe sound

like not a very practical solution, but I hope that it is.

I actually did for many years teach self-defense.

And I do think that physical self-defense is a big part

of what women are going to have to,

and I wish that this were not true.

I really do think that that's one

of the most valuable things that women can learn

is actually how to defend themselves physically,

not just because of the physical aspect of it,

but because of the other things

that are taught in good self-defense programs,

which is reinforcing for women

that no is a complete sentence,

people who are trying to push your boundaries early on

are going to do much worse things later.

Here are the red flags,

here are the kinds of things to avoid.

Here's how you can engage in solidarity

with people who are also vulnerable.

So I think that's a big part of the conversation is

try to change men's behavior

because they have to be held accountable,

but also try to make sure that should it not go that way,

that you will be prepared to be able

to physically defend yourself and maybe help others.

To that end, what advice would you give young men

starting college about best practices?

Like what are some of the traps,

particularly in the tech space,

that you see young men getting caught up in

and what can they do to basically avoid them or be better?

Well, here I would start with something

that I think probably is advice that I would give to men

and women both, which is be much more intentional

about why you are engaging with technology

and social media in particular.

I used to teach a class called Law Policy and Technology

and I would start it out by saying

the last time you were on your phone

or doing something on a social media site,

do you remember, you know, why you were on it

or were you drifting through?

Was it something that you were doing kind of thoughtlessly

or were you trying to reach a certain goal with it?

And part of what I wanted them to think about was,

you know, I can use social media,

but I don't want it to be using me at the same time.

So be intentional about why you're on it,

what you're getting out of it.

Ask yourself after you've engaged on social media,

do you feel better, worse?

Have you learned something? Do you feel stupider?

Are you angry? Right?

Just to ask yourself,

What am I actually getting out of this experience?

Because what I found is that people becoming much more

conscious about their social media practices,

they already know a lot of things

that probably sound obvious,

but maybe they haven't confronted,

which is social media might be making us angrier and dumber

and wasting our time

because what are the other things we could actually be doing

with our time intentionally?

So a big part of it, totally neutral,

is try to think intentionally

about why you're using social media

and then think about all the things

that could go wrong and why.

And also think about how if it's not something

that you would do right in front of somebody,

why would you do it online?

Which sounds obvious too, but sometimes escapes us

because there is a gamification

and dehumanization factor to being online.

And I think that that's what I would suggest

that there are patterns here

that everybody should know about

and they're probably not patterns that you want to embrace.

So try not to embrace them

and really have answers for why it is

that you're making decisions every day,

including the ones that you're making online.

What does that actually look like though,

in terms of being intentional

about the way you use social media?

Does it mean deleting certain apps?

Does it mean engaging less?

Well, specifically when we would have conversations,

and we do have a lot of conversations about

image-based sexual abuse, right?

It's a question about, one, for everyone,

because we've actually seen a lot more victimization

of young men when it comes to sextortion schemes.

There's this kind of epidemic that's happening

that's really targeting young men,

and I mean like young teenagers.

And what breaks my heart about it

and what breaks my heart about a lot of these things is

how many of these interactions begin

because boys, girls, everyone are so lonely

because they are being told, Oh, you're very attractive

or I'd like to get to know you better

or I find you really sexy.

Send me a photo. Show me this.

How much of it begins in this really heartbreaking

desire for connection, right,

that obviously people are so eager for

and then it turns into something really dark really fast.

So I would think about, you know,

again, what is the interaction

that you're trying to have here?

Do you want to put pieces of yourself out into the world

because you want connection or is it because of something?

Is it something that you are grasping for

that you're not going to get

out of the social media connection?

And a big part of it is just telling them

all the horror stories of what can happen to you

without trying to blame people for what happens to them,

just telling them these are the kinds of things

that can happen.

So I think, think really carefully about what you want

to reveal of yourself to others.

Think of yourself as something precious, right,

that does not need to be parceled out to other people

because you are enough in yourself.

You don't need to be chasing

after someone else's validation, hopefully,

that you probably have skills and you probably have hobbies

and you probably have interests

and you probably have important actual connections

around you that you could be spending time on.

So a lot of this is do less of it

because there are probably more valuable things

with your time, but also be aware of the things

that can go so badly, so quickly

and how those things are almost always going

to begin in a place of vulnerability,

either yours or someone else's.

And try to not look at vulnerability

as something to exploit.

Look at it as something to guide or to support

or if nothing else,

to not make worse when you see it in someone else.

I understand that the work you do

can be incredibly stressful.

I know I'm stressed out every single day looking at my feed.

What I want to know is what gives you hope?

What do you see changing right now in real time?

It is sometimes hard to find hope,

but looking at the Cornell Daily Sun editorial,

when I saw that headline, Cornell Won't We Will,

when I saw that these were students who had kind of stuck

with the story, that really wanted to tell the story

and they knew that it was a risk, right?

That they knew that there were going to be all kinds

of legal and other implications of bringing the story out.

I just thought, I don't know why these are not

the free speech hero stories that we're telling

because to me that's a free speech hero story.

That is such a dedicated, brave kind of thing to do.

And that really does make me,

it does give me some hope.

It does actually give me hope that people continue,

despite all of the terrible things

that might be awaiting them for doing so,

people do continue to speak out

because they know something to be true

or because they're trying to highlight

something that is important.

And so journalism is one of those things

that really does speak to me still.

When there are stories like yours,

when there's stories like the Cornell Daily Sun's,

I think, okay, there are still people who are going

to talk about this no matter how much

negative consequences are going to come from that.

And I think that that's important

and as long as people are still willing to do that,

then there's still something worth fighting for.

Here's hoping.

Thank you so much for being here today, Mary Anne,

and for taking the time to talk about this.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much, EJ, for having me on.

[warbling digital music]