Content warning: please note, this article contains details about animal exploitation and online harassment, which some readers may find distressing.
In this article, Researcher Network member Cara Langford Watts discusses how online harassment of vegans is routinely minimised and explained away, and examines the implications of this
For many vegans, social media is both refuge and cesspit.
It is where we find each other, share ideas, build community, document animal abuse, challenge the everyday normalisation of violence. And try, with varying degrees of optimism, to persuade other humans not to eat, wear, exploit or otherwise instrumentalise sentient beings. It is also where many vegans are mocked, piled on, threatened, baited, bullied, trolled, misrepresented, and told to calm down by people whose main ethical framework appears to be “mmm, bacon.”
This is not exactly a shocking revelation. Most vegans who have spent more than twelve seconds online will already know that speaking publicly about animals can make you a target. What interests me is not simply that this happens, but how it is so often explained away.
The response to online harassment is frequently soaked in the language of minimisation. Block them. Ignore it. Don’t feed the trolls. Step away from social media. Grow a thicker skin. As though the problem is not that people are engaging in targeted hostility, intimidation or abuse, but that the recipient has failed to become spiritually evolved enough not to mind. The burden quietly shifts. Harm becomes something you are expected to absorb with grace, maturity, and, preferably, a good ring light. This pattern is deeply familiar to anyone studying the psychology of justification.
In my research, I explore the ways people rationalise animal consumption online. The arguments are often tediously recognisable: it’s natural, it’s normal, everyone does it, there are bigger problems, plants feel pain, lions eat meat, and so on. Beneath their surface absurdity, these are not just rhetorical arguments. They are psychological strategies. They protect moral identity, reduce discomfort, maintain a sense of belonging, and preserve the status quo. In short, they help people avoid having to think too hard while continuing to do what they were already planning to do.
What I have increasingly come to see is that these justificatory habits do not stay politely confined to debates about animals. They travel. They resurface in responses to online harassment, too. Harm is minimised, responsibility is diffused, and victims are subtly reconstructed as inconveniently reactive. In both cases, the function is similar: keep the system stable, keep discomfort low, and, if possible, make the person raising the issue appear to be the real problem.
Online harassment is not trivial, however much digital culture likes to pretend otherwise. Research shows that online harassment can have serious psychological, social and economic consequences, including fear, shame, anxiety, withdrawal from participation, relationship strain, and disruption to work and everyday life (Cricenti et al., 2022; Im et al., 2022). The characteristics of online abuse, such as repetition, visibility, anonymity and persistence, often intensify rather than reduce the impact (Cricenti et al., 2022). In other words, being harassed by hundreds of people in public, potentially forever, is not magically less harmful because it happens via Wi-Fi.
This is especially relevant for vegans, because social media is not just where we discuss violence against animals; it is where we try to make that violence visible. Footage from farms, slaughterhouses, live transport, fishing operations and laboratories circulates online precisely because mainstream culture works so hard to keep these realities sanitised, hidden or euphemised. The public is invited to enjoy the product, not scrutinise the process. Social media disrupts that arrangement.
But here’s the strange part. Platforms often appear more comfortable managing the visibility of animal suffering than the harassment directed at people exposing it. Graphic footage may be restricted, hidden behind warnings, demonetised, or removed. Meanwhile, the mockery, dogpiling, threats and abuse directed at vegan advocates can remain remarkably resilient. Apparently, the severed body of an exploited being is controversial, but telling someone they are 'insane', 'hysterical', extreme or deserving of abuse for caring about it is just robust public debate.
That leaves vegan advocates in a rather elegant double bind. To show the truth, we must risk exposure. To expose violence, we may invite more of it. Then, if we report that harm, we are often required to translate an unfolding pattern of abuse into the clunky bureaucratic vocabulary of platform reporting systems, as though cumulative intimidation can be neatly captured by ticking one little box marked “harassment.”
This is where the issue of reporting becomes politically important.
When vegans are harassed online, the first port of call is rarely the police. It is usually the platform itself. The victim must identify the abuse, preserve evidence, categorise it correctly, and submit it through whatever labyrinthine reporting process has been designed by people who seem deeply committed to ensuring nobody enjoys the experience. The abuse, meanwhile, may be part threat, part smear campaign, part pile-on, part misogyny, part reputational undermining, and part playground sadism dressed up as irony. But the system would prefer that you select one neat category and move on.
Research suggests that this is not simply frustrating but structurally significant. What victims often seek is not only content removal but also recognition, fairness, and meaningful accountability (Im et al., 2022). Yet reporting systems tend to fragment harm into isolated incidents, even when the actual experience is cumulative and patterned. The problem is not just this comment, this post, or this message. The problem is what emerges across time: a climate of intimidation, silencing and attrition.
For vegans, this is made worse by the fact that hostility towards us is often treated as culturally fair game. Sneering at vegans is practically a minor social pastime. There is a whole genre of public discourse that treats ethical concern for animals as inherently ridiculous, humourless, self-righteous or extreme. One does not need to look very far to find vegans framed as fragile fanatics in need of mockery for their own good. In that context, harassment can easily be dismissed as banter, and repeated abuse as mere disagreement.
Research on cyber-harassment suggests that victims are often dissatisfied with institutional responses and may encounter assumptions that they should alter their own behaviour rather than expect meaningful intervention (Millman et al., 2019). Research on journalists’ perceptions of legal protection in Sweden similarly found that online harassment is often trivialised and that victim-blaming remains a significant barrier to trust and reporting (Björkenfeldt, 2023). The details differ across groups, but the broader pattern is painfully familiar: if you enter public space and are punished for speaking, the system often asks first what you might have done differently.
How efficient.
There is, of course, another problem. Online abuse is not always individual. It can be networked, contagious and performative. A single post can trigger hundreds of hostile responses. A defamatory narrative can spread rapidly. Trolls can summon audiences. Harassment can become participatory, with each individual actor adding just enough ambiguity to remain deniable while the cumulative effect is unmistakable. Research on technology-facilitated abuse shows how digital harms can move virally and draw in wider networks of participants, making the target feel unable to escape (Dragiewicz et al., 2018). In such contexts, advising someone to “just block them” has all the sophistication of responding to a house fire by recommending thicker curtains.
We also need to be honest about the governance of these spaces. Platform moderation is often opaque, inconsistent and increasingly automated. Decisions about what is amplified, hidden, removed, or ignored may involve a combination of internal policy, overworked human moderators, reporting categories designed with all the nuance of a broken toaster, and automated systems expected to detect context with the sensitivity of a startled brick. Research on content moderation and contestability shows that moderation decisions can be inconsistent and unfair, and that users often lack meaningful ways to challenge them (Vaccaro et al., 2021). Research on algorithmic content moderation further highlights the technical and political difficulties of automating platform governance, especially where context, intent and cumulative harm matter (Gorwa et al., 2020).
So no, AI is not literally a judge. But increasingly, private platforms and their automated systems do perform quasi-judgmental functions. They help determine what harm counts, what remains visible, what is removed, what is urgent, what is ignorable, and which kinds of complainants are effectively legible within the system. The first adjudication of online harm is often not legal at all. It is infrastructural. And that should concern anyone interested in justice.
For vegans, all of this raises a simple but profound question: who gets protected online, and whose suffering is considered too awkward, too graphic, too disruptive, or too unpopular to be handled with care?
If online spaces are now central to activism, public education and movement-building, then harassment directed at vegans is not a side issue. It is part of the wider politics of silencing. If people are punished for showing what happens to animals, if they are worn down by ridicule and abuse, and if reporting systems fail to grasp the cumulative nature of that harm, then the chilling effect is real. Some will withdraw. Some will post less. Some will stop sharing footage altogether. Some will decide, quite reasonably, that being publicly flayed by strangers before breakfast is no longer a hobby they wish to maintain.
That is not a minor inconvenience. It is a political outcome.
The same culture that normalises violence against animals often normalises hostility towards those who expose it. In both cases, harm is sustained through justification. It is reframed, softened, deflected, or dressed up as common sense. That is why online harassment is not just a problem of manners. It is a problem of power. It is about who can speak, who gets worn down, whose pain is recognisable, and which truths are treated as too socially expensive to hear.
Vegans have long understood that social change requires making the invisible visible. But visibility has costs. If platforms and institutions are serious about reducing online harm, they need to recognise not only explicit threats, but cumulative intimidation, reputational abuse, mockery as social disciplining, and the silencing effects of coordinated hostility. And if we are serious about building a more compassionate world, we need to stop behaving as though abuse directed at inconvenient voices is simply part of the furniture.
Online harm is not just a matter of tone. It is a matter of justice, visibility and whose suffering society is prepared to register as real.
References
Björkenfeldt, O. (2023). Swedish journalists’ perceptions of legal protection against unlawful online harassment. Frontiers in Sociology, 8, 1154495. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2023.1154495
Cricenti, C., Pizzo, A., Quaglieri, A., et al. (2022). Did they deserve it? Adolescents’ perception of online harassment in a real-case scenario. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(24), 17040. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192417040
Dragiewicz, M., Burgess, J., Matamoros-Fernández, A., et al. (2018). Technology facilitated coercive control: Domestic violence and the competing roles of digital media platforms. Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), 609–625. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447341
Gorwa, R., Binns, R., & Katzenbach, C. (2020). Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance. Big Data & Society, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719897945
Im, J., Schoenebeck, S., Iriarte, M., et al. (2022). Women’s perspectives on harm and justice after online harassment. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(CSCW2), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555775
Millman, C., Winder, B., & Griffiths, M. D. (2019). UK-based police officers’ perceptions of, and role in investigating, cyber-harassment as a crime. In M. Khosrow-Pour (Ed.), Advanced Methodologies and Technologies in Media and Communications (pp. 290–307). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-7672-3.ch014
Spaccatini, F., Pacilli, M. G., & Pagliaro, S. (2022). Victim blaming 2.0: blaming sexualized victims of online harassment lowers bystanders’ helping intentions. Current Psychology, 42, 19054–19064. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02884-8
Vaccaro, K., Xiao, Z., Hamilton, K., et al. (2021). Contestability for content moderation. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1145/3476059
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