Fifty Rape Threats an Hour Over a Banknote
In 2013, the British campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez won a push to keep a woman on an English banknote. The victory was met with weeks of Twitter rape and death threats, at times around 50 abusive messages an hour, that ended in criminal convictions.
The campaign itself was modest in scope. Criado-Perez had pressed the Bank of England to feature a woman on its currency after it emerged that Winston Churchill would replace the social reformer Elizabeth Fry, leaving no woman other than the Queen on an English note. In July 2013, the bank announced that the novelist Jane Austen would appear on the £10 note. The abuse began almost immediately.
‘Incredibly graphic, incredibly violent’
The first threat arrived on Twitter the day after the announcement, Criado-Perez told the International Peace Institute’s Global Observatory in an October 2013 interview. What followed was roughly two and a half weeks of sustained rape and death threats. “They were incredibly graphic, incredibly violent and very specific about which parts of my body were going to have what happened to them,” she said.
At the peak, the volume overwhelmed any attempt to respond. “If you are receiving up to 50 rape threats an hour, you can’t really be expected to report each one individually,” Criado-Perez told the Global Observatory. A legal account of the case by the Open University Law School records that, at its height, she received approximately 50 abusive tweets an hour over a 12-hour period.
Convictions
Two people were later prosecuted for the most severe messages. John Nimmo and Isabella Sorley pleaded guilty to sending menacing communications to Criado-Perez and to the Labour MP Stella Creasy, who had supported her, under the Communications Act 2003, according to ITV News. In January 2014, Sorley was sentenced to 12 weeks in prison and Nimmo to eight, and each was ordered to pay Criado-Perez £400. The Open University Law School notes that the case produced the first custodial sentences in Britain for social media abuse.
A button, and its limits
The scale of the abuse fed a public campaign for Twitter to make reporting easier; a Change.org petition calling for a “report abuse” button gathered more than 86,000 signatures before the company responded, ABC News reported. Within days the company moved to let users flag an individual tweet from within the post itself, a feature it said it would extend across its apps. In a blog post titled “We hear you,” Twitter’s senior director of trust and safety, Del Harvey, wrote that the company used “both automated and manual systems to evaluate reports of users potentially violating our Twitter Rules,” while acknowledging that manually reviewing every tweet was not possible, according to Forbes.
Criado-Perez and Creasy argued at the time that the change did not go far enough, saying the button still routed users to a reporting form they called too long and impractical, ABC News reported. The episode became an early, widely cited test of how platforms respond when coordinated abuse targets women in public life — a pattern that researchers and rights groups have documented repeatedly in the years since.