‘Overwhelmed by hate’: COVID-19 scientists face an avalanche of abuse, survey shows
When Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus University Medical Center, visited a museum in Amsterdam with her family last year, she was spotted by the wrong crowd: people who hate Koopmans because of her work on COVID-19. “They started really yelling, banging,” she says. “Security locked the doors.”
Since early in the pandemic, Koopmans has found herself targeted by people who believe the pandemic is a hoax, the virus was created intentionally to cause harm, or vaccines are dangerous. She has received death threats, been accused of belonging to an elite network of pedophiles—a belief held by devotees of the QAnon conspiracy theory—and told she should be tried for crimes against humanity.
Now, Koopmans no longer makes public appearances without first alerting the police. As a frequent guest on Dutch TV, “I cannot go out on the street anonymously,” she says. Her family is not comfortable walking outside with her, and they worry about her ever traveling to the United States, where much of the vitriol originates.
She’s not alone. When, in March 2020, a science story became the biggest news story in the world, scientists became household names overnight, even celebrities. But many also became the targets of new and extreme levels of harassment, intimidation, and threats. U.K. Chief Medical Advisor Chris Whitty was accosted by two men in a London park; disease ecologist Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance received a letter containing white powder that resembled anthrax; Belgian virologist Marc Van Ranst and his family were moved to a safe house after he was threatened by a former soldier who was later found dead in a national park.
Social media storm
To better understand the level of intimidation, its effects, and the ways scientists cope with it, Science asked 9585 researchers who have published on COVID-19 to fill out an online survey about their experiences. Of 510 who responded, 38% reported at least one type of attack, ranging from insults to death threats, delivered on social media, by email or phone, or sometimes even in person. Those who were harassed described a range of effects on their lives, including workplace problems and mental health issues. (For more details on the survey, see sidebar, below.)
The findings broadly align with other indications that harassment is hitting science and related fields. The Geneva-based nonprofit Insecurity Insight reports 517 instances of physical violence related to COVID-19, including 10 health workers killed, 24 kidnapped, and 89 injured. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health this month found harassment experiences at 57% of 583 U.S. local health departments and 80 departures by officials who reported harassment.
But the Science survey paints a nuanced picture of what researchers have experienced. A Nature survey published in October 2021 gave a startling figure: Eighty-one percent of 321 scientists who had frequently discussed COVID-19 in the media reported receiving at least occasional personal attacks, with 25% saying these attacks were common or constant. In contrast, Science surveyed COVID-19 researchers both with and without media exposure and found the majority reported no harassment and only a small minority experienced intense levels. The most extreme forms of harassment, such as threats of violence, suspicious packages or letters, and unwanted visits—although terrible for those who experience them—were reported relatively rarely.
An outbreak of harassment
Out of 510 COVID-19 researchers surveyed by Science, 38% reported at least one kind of harassment. Personal insults and attacks on people’s competence or integrity were most often reported. Threats of violence, “doxxing,” and unwanted visits were far less common.
Harassment was more prevalent in a separate survey of 44,468 members of AAAS, publisher of Science, which asked not about harassment during the past 2 years, but over scientists’ entire careers. In that survey, which yielded 1281 responses from scientists in a wide range of fields, more than half (51%) of respondents reported receiving at least one kind of harassment, sometimes continuing for decades.
Although the results are impossible to compare directly with the COVID-19 survey—which only looked at the past 2 years—they indicate harassment is not new or limited to COVID-19. To those in fields like climate science and animal research, the stories of COVID-19 scientists are depressingly familiar. “We’re here; we feel your pain,” says Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, who has faced decades of attacks. “Talk to us. We’ve got some lessons that we’ve learned.”
A new wave of abuse
Among COVID-19 researchers who reported being harassed, 71% said they experienced far less abuse or none at all before the pandemic began.
The pandemic has nonetheless made things far worse for some researchers. More than half of the COVID-19 researchers who reported harassment said it was a new experience for them, and a further 31% said the pandemic had increased the problem. One reason is greater exposure: These researchers grew their audiences during the pandemic or entered the public sphere for the first time. The pandemic also struck at a time when polarization was already on the rise. Many other people working in the public interest—from election officials to school board members—are under attack as well, says Sarah Sobieraj, a sociologist at Tufts University who studies digital abuse and harassment. The widespread vitriol, she says, “impacts not just those people who are attacked, but all of us who rely on these kinds of professionals to do the work to keep societies functioning in a healthy way.”
Some commentators say increased attention to the new victims and the shocking experiences they describe may be the catalyst for research institutions to finally pay some attention to the issue, rather than treating it as a problem for researchers to solve on their own—or, worse, blaming and even punishing them for the abuse they experience.
The pandemic was not Tara Smith’s first brush with public hostility. Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University’s main campus, has spoken out about politicized topics, including evolution and HIV denial, for many years. But since 2020, “frustration and hatred” have come pouring out at a higher volume and with more extreme content, she says, including death threats. When prominent Twitter accounts mention her, Smith is swarmed by multitudes tweeting abuse. “You just get overwhelmed by the hate,” she says.
Several researchers have been exploring the dynamics behind such attacks. What Smith is experiencing, for example, is “networked harassment” by swarms of people who share social media networks, says Alice Marwick, a communication researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Swarms are often not coordinated: Participants following similar prominent social media accounts may act independently but in the same way.
A driving force behind networked harassment is a perception that the target of the abuse has violated a moral norm, says Marwick, who has interviewed harassment victims and employees of social media companies to better understand the phenomenon. In the case of COVID-19, an important moral norm for people in a range of communities—from “wellness” fans to conspiracy theorists—is the belief that Big Pharma is evil. The conviction that researchers who, for example, promote vaccination are hiding conflicts of interest “allows people to feel like they’re on a high horse, and it triggers moral outrage,” Marwick says. They may come to see scientists as “bad people who must be stopped for the good of the world.” Morally motivated harassment occurs across the political spectrum, she adds; it is often directed at those perceived as racist or sexist.
Science’s survey asked COVID-19 researchers about specific pandemic-related stances they had publicly supported, and found that positions in a few highly polarized debates were more strongly correlated with intense harassment than others. Arguing against the use of the antiparasitic medicine ivermectin to treat COVID-19 (for which it appears to be ineffective), and for the likelihood that the virus originated naturally rather than in a lab accident, had the strongest links to harassment.
Views that draw vitriol
Scientists who publicly advocated hotly debated positions on COVID-19 received more harassment, the survey suggests. These correlations could have different explanations. The stances themselves could drive the abuse, for example, or prominent scientists may both receive more abuse and advocate for certain positions more often.
Even if the attacking swarms aren’t coordinated, outside groups often inflame them, says Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a U.S. nonprofit. Antivaccination groups, for instance, spread the message that vaccine advocates cannot be trusted, Ahmed says. They rely on social media companies’ algorithms, built to monetize and prioritize attention, which in turn is driven by outrage. A controversial tweet is likely to accumulate interactions, as people leap into the fray to amplify the message or voice their disagreement.
Some of these actors are “economically motivated,” Ahmed says. Expanding their reach means more revenue through donations and sales of products such as books and supplements. By driving networked harassment, such individuals can intimidate scientists into silence: “If you’re a scientist—which has a lot of epistemic weight in society—and you decide not to post as a result: job done!”
Another group of people driving the attacks are “essentially parasitic,” Ahmed says: pundits, politicians, and commentators who purposefully court conflict on social media, knowing that fights drive visibility and, in turn, lead to more followers and greater impact. Fox News host Tucker Carlson has called Anthony Fauci, a top U.S. government scientist, “an even shorter version of Benito Mussolini” and said Baylor University vaccine researcher Peter Hotez is a “nutcase” and a “charlatan.”
Hotez was also criticized by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R)—in a Fox News segment that referred to Hotez as a “medical cartel member”—which unleashed torrents of abuse. “Antiscience has become institutionalized,” Hotez says. “It’s now firmly ensconced in Europe. It’s a major element of the far right and the Republican Party, and it’s working to portray scientists as the enemy of the state.” Mann and his fellow climatologist Ben Santer, formerly at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, have come under political fire as well. “You speak publicly about the science … it conflicts with powerful politicians, you get hammered,” Santer says.
The effect of exposure
The attention COVID-19 scientists receive on social media, in news stories, and as policy advisers was correlated with the amount of harassment they experienced. (Both exposure and harassment are expressed as scores that factor in type and frequency of harassment and attention.) Exposure may directly drive abuse, or prominence or some other factor may drive both exposure and abuse. Some scientists had a great deal of exposure but suffered little harassment, and vice versa.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University, sees the attacks on science and scientists—and on the press—as a feature of the rise of authoritarianism. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and the U.S. Republican Party all use common tactics, she says. “Authoritarians and extremists want to intimidate you and get you to shut up,” she says. “They want you to say it’s not worth it, I’ll stay in my laboratory, I won’t speak out.”
Scientists and public health officials have sometimes inadvertently fanned the flames. Muddled communication about scientific uncertainty—like the World Health Organization’s original position that ordinary people should not wear masks, which was soon overturned—may have undermined trust in science, says Kolina Koltai, a misinformation researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle. “You feel like your life is being ruined because of these scientists,” she says. “You want to direct that hate to someone.”
In Science’s survey of COVID-19 researchers, the most common types of harassment reported were insults, attacks on professional capabilities, and accusations of dishonesty or corruption. But for some, the attacks were more extreme: Six percent reported receiving wishes of harm or death, and 3% reported death threats. Among AAAS members, representing a broader range of scientific disciplines, these numbers were higher, with 14% reporting death wishes. (People with particularly terrible experiences may have been more likely to answer the survey, driving up those numbers.)
For Fatima Tokhmafshan, a geneticist at McGill University who came to Canada as a refugee from Iran at the age of 17, much of the vitriol has been Islamophobic or xenophobic. Before COVID-19, “I never experienced anybody calling me a filthy immigrant, telling me I deserve to be raped and have my head on a spike because I want to vaccinate kids,” says Tokhmafshan, who has tried to counter misinformation on social media. Hotez says much of the abuse he receives is antisemitic. For epidemiologist Saskia Popescu of the University of Arizona, it’s a “quiet week” if she doesn’t receive at least two or three sexualized messages, ranging from creepy men demanding attention to rape threats.
The survey had too few members of racial and sexual minorities to explore how these identities affected harassment. There was no correlation between gender and the level of harassment, but that result may be specific to the survey population and does not mean gender plays no role in abuse. “Any kind of person can be harassed,” Marwick says, but attackers are likely to seize on any weapon they can, including personal characteristics and group identities. These are “attack vectors,” Marwick says: assumed vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. Because people who are harassed and abused are more likely to self-censor—or withdraw from public appearances altogether—attacks on people from underrepresented groups could mean losing their voices at a higher rate, Sobieraj says.
Most researchers who spoke to Science for this story declined to comment on the impacts of the abuse on their lives, worried that doing so could fuel further sadism. But our survey shows researchers who were harassed most commonly reported anxiety, fear for their reputation, and loss of productivity as a result of the abuse. Other, more extreme effects included substance abuse and stress-related illness or injury.
A serious toll
Researchers who were harassed reported a range of effects on both their professional and private lives, including workplace problems and mental health issues.
One animal researcher who spoke on condition of anonymity said the threats affected their family as well. Their young daughter found a box of hate mail postcards—including death threats—in their office, for example. Santer says his son felt unsafe at home after someone left a dead rat on his doorstep. The attacks he faced “had catastrophic implications for my family,” he says. “It was, in a sense, a loss of innocence for me.” In the surveys, 22% of COVID-19 researchers and 20% of AAAS members reported that harassment had caused at least some family or social problems.
Accusations of immorality are particularly bruising, some researchers say. Ellie Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, has been vocal about the need to protect children from infections, but her message has been twisted into accusations of being “pro–school closure,” she says, and then to “people claiming that I encourage child suicide.” Theresa Chapple, who directs a local health department in the United States, has been accused of being “antichildren,” she says, “which is really hard to hear … because my Ph.D. is in maternal and child health.”
The toll of online harassment is often too easily dismissed, says criminologist Matthew Williams of Cardiff University. “It’s akin to having your house burgled, in terms of the psychological impact,” he says. And there’s no escape, Sobieraj says: Online harassment is not constrained to a time or place, and can pop up in the middle of everyday activities, like texting a friend. Even nonviolent insults can be traumatic when they come in swarms, Marwick says: “On a day-to-day basis, there’s very few situations in which you’re going to have a roomful of people yelling at you.”
The impact has not stopped researchers like Mann and Santer from speaking publicly about climate science for many years. Others may not want to pay that price; every researcher should decide on their own comfort level, Santer says, but “if you do enter that public arena, then put on your battle armor.”
That should start with a thorough assessment of the threat of harassment before you enter the fray, says Cornell University computational social scientist J. Nathan Matias. Researchers should ask themselves what needs protection—like personal details, or family members—who wants to cause harm, what tactics they might use, and what can be done to minimize risks. Researchers should not underestimate the threat—or overestimate it, which can make them stay silent unnecessarily, Matias says.
Researchers reported a range of tactics to cope with abuse. Blocking or muting trolls on social media, or not reading comments on news articles or social media posts, were among the most widely used, Science’s survey shows. (Some sources find blocking just fuels the hatred, however, as the blocked individuals create new accounts and swarm from them.) Smaller numbers of respondents reported far more drastic measures, such as deleting their social media accounts, refraining from giving policy advice, or beefing up home security.
Coping mechanisms
Many of the COVID-19 researchers surveyed sought to avoid or suppress harassment by muting or blocking people on social media. Others took more drastic steps to withdraw from public communication, such as deleting accounts or turning down publicity opportunities.
Some scientists also use email filters to remove messages with certain keywords; others have assistants who screen their mailboxes. Simple steps like Googling one’s own address or phone number can help identify where personal details might need to be scrubbed so they can’t be revealed online, Marwick says. (For resources to help with online abuse, see sidebar, below.)
It’s imperative not to reply to abusive individuals on social media, Ahmed says, because this just fuels the algorithm. “Ignore, block, take a timeout, and then go and find some good content, and engage with that instead.” Engaging with politicians and pundits is particularly risky, he adds: “A good political operative can wipe the floor on social media with someone who doesn’t know what fight they’re in. … They’re thinking that we’re arguing about the truth. The political actor is just thinking, I’m arguing.”
Whitney Robinson, an epidemiologist at Duke University, has found an unusual outlet that avoids abuse. In the past, she studied and worked at a public university in a conservative state where retaliation against outspoken faculty is not uncommon, she says. That, and the vitriol she knows she would attract as a Black woman, has made her cautious on social media. But a newsletter in her historically Black neighborhood has welcomed her expertise on COVID-19. She feels fortunate to be part of a community not torn apart by politics: “There are people who live in places that are superpolarized. It’s so hard.”
The problem of online hate can’t be solved by individuals, Sobieraj says. “We tend to misrecognize this as a personal problem, when it is absolutely a social problem or a public issue.” Universities that encourage public communication need to recognize that they are exposing researchers to a hostile environment, and that the impact of this may fall disproportionately on people from more marginalized groups, she says. All too often, institutions fail to support researchers who are experiencing abuse, Marwick adds.
Instead, administrators sometimes assume the abuse has some merit, particularly when they are receiving direct complaints about a researcher—which is a common abuse tactic. One researcher who spoke to Science on condition of anonymity says their university hauled them over the coals after they tweeted about attacks from a senior and eminent researcher. Another has been warned their promotion would be in doubt if they did not stop their activity on social media.
Science’s survey found that fewer than 10% of harassed COVID-19 researchers received legal (7%), technological (8%), security (5%), or mental health (6%) support from their employers. Respondents said they hoped for—but did not receive—help from university press offices and assistance with screening communication. Many also said they wanted emotional support: assurance that they were not at fault and that their public communication work was valuable. “Institutions haven’t invested the resources to protect people who are at the heart of the scientific endeavor,” Matias says.
Social media platforms could also do far more, Sobieraj says. A huge amount of abuse violates the terms of service of companies like Facebook and Twitter: “It is very reasonable that, as a society, we would expect these platforms to uphold their own policies.” Companies need to improve their moderation strategies, says Sarita Schoenebeck, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who studies online abuse. Moderating individual pieces of abusive content is like playing whack-a-mole, she says; focusing on entire communities and organized networks would be more effective.
But ultimately, the abuse stems from deep societal problems, Koltai says. When the pandemic hit, huge numbers of people had already lost faith in health care systems and governments. “Without addressing those big societal issues that make people feel like they’re unheard, or they’re dismissed, or feeling like they’re wronged in some particular way … we’re never going to get rid of the harassment that scientists face.”
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