One Hundred Thousand Messages for One Teenager

After a 16-year-old in France criticised Islam during a 2020 livestream, she was buried under more than 100,000 hate messages, including death and rape threats, and had to leave school under police protection. In July 2021 a Paris court convicted eleven people of online harassment.

A livestream, then a flood

On 18 January 2020, a 16-year-old girl known publicly as Mila, from the Grenoble area of southeastern France, criticised Islam and the Quran in videos she posted on Instagram and later TikTok. According to Euronews, the teenager, who identifies as an atheist, drew a wave of reaction online that forced her to change schools and to be placed under police protection.

Her lawyer, Richard Malka, said Mila had received some 100,000 threatening messages, including death threats and rape threats, along with hateful messages about her sexual orientation, according to Al Jazeera. The case, which touched on free speech, blasphemy and online abuse, became one of the most closely watched in France.

The verdict

On 7 July 2021, a Paris court convicted 11 of 13 defendants of online harassment, France 24 reported. The defendants, most of them in their early twenties, received suspended prison terms of four to six months and were fined, according to Al Jazeera. One defendant was acquitted after the court found his message had been directed at Mila's account rather than at her, and the case against another was dropped over procedural grounds.

The trial was among the first heard by a specialised Paris court set up in January 2021 to prosecute online offences, including harassment and hate speech, Al Jazeera reported.

The “street” argument

Reading the verdict, the presiding judge, Michel Humbert, drew a line between conduct offline and online. “When you pass someone in the street, you don't insult them, threaten them, make fun of them,” he said, adding, “What you don't do in the street, don't do on social media,” according to Euronews.

A pattern researchers track

The case illustrates a dynamic that researchers of online abuse have documented repeatedly: a single post can trigger a coordinated pile-on in which many accounts converge on one target, and the volume itself becomes the harm. Women and girls are frequently the focus of such campaigns, which often blend threats of sexual violence with attacks on identity. For a teenager, the flood of more than 100,000 messages meant leaving school and living under police protection — a measure of how far an online swarm can reach into ordinary life.