J.K. Rowling Shuts Down White Man's Ridiculous Solution To Online Abuse

Queen of Twitter J.K. Rowling is at it again with a spot-on sarcastic tweet about online abuse.

On Friday, the Harry Potter author responded to a tweet from Iain Macwhriter, a columnist for The Herald and The Sunday Herald. In his tweet, Macwhirter offered a solution to online abuse: simply ignore it!

“Why can’t people just accept that Twitter attracts nutters and sociopaths,” he tweeted. “Why listen?”

In a perfectly sarcastic tweet, Rowling pointed out why Macwhirter might not be the best person to fix the problem.

With the hashtag #HeterosexualWhiteMaleSolutions, Rowling revealed the way white men are treated online. In April, The Guardian set out to see how online abuse affected its columnists and found that white men had it relatively easy on the internet compared to their colleagues:

Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.

And the 10 regular writers who got the least abuse? All men.

A study from March also found that the online harassment of women is on its way to becoming an “established norm” if nothing is done to stop it. If internet users listened to Macwhirter and “just accept” this abuse, that study could predict an (even more) ugly future online.