545: If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: OK. So let's all just pause here for a second for something that is so rare on public radio or, you know, I guess, anywhere, actually. Let's pause for something that everyone can agree on. Something that doesn't divide Republicans and Democrats, Sunni and Shia, Taylor Swift fans and Katy Perry fans.

This something that I found like that everybody can agree on is a graphic. It's a graphic that somebody showed me on the internet. It's an optical illusion created by a professor at MIT who studies vision and the brain.

And basically, there are two gray boxes. One of them is surrounded by lighter stuff so it looks darker, and the other gray box is surrounded by darker stuff so it looks lighter. But in fact, the whole point of it is it's an optical illusion. The two gray squares are exactly the same shade of gray.

Now, that's just a fact. But of course, since this graphic is on the internet, there's a comment section. And you might think, what would you possibly comment on? Right?

It doesn't seem like there's anything, really, here to discuss. Gray is gray. And I'll refrain from a Fifty Shades of Gray joke here and just say, when you scroll down through the comments, people do find a way to disagree, even about this.

And I don't know, maybe you've been on the internet-- they like to curse about it. One person writes, "what a load of shit. They are different colors." Another writes, "not the same [BEEP] shade." Says a third, "not convinced."

Then people start in with advice. And at first, they're like, super nice about it, right? They're trying to be helpful. They tell the doubters to take their fingers and cover over everything but the two gray squares on their screen and they'll see they are the same color.

Several people suggested they can open up the file on Photoshop or MS Paint and use the Dropper tool to see the exact RGB values of the colors and they'll see that they're the same. By the way, 120, 120, 120 with 160 hue, 113 loom.

After all of that, somebody still writes, "The second square looks brighter to me." Somebody else replies, "It's definitely brighter than you." People start calling each other stupid, which of course leads to the kind of big, overbroad, sweeping statement you see in comment sections everywhere. Quote, "If after reading this thread, you refuse to actually test it and choose to stick with your dogmatic belief, then you are everything that is wrong with America."

You know, I think we're all so used to all kinds of ugliness online in comment sections and Twitter and Facebook and everywhere else. At this point, most of us don't even give it a second thought. And so today on our radio show, we decided, well, let's give it a second thought.

Let's dive into the bile. Let's dive into the hate and look around and see whatever we can understand. Let's ask the dumbest questions. Like, why so mad? And if you are so mad, why go to the trouble to tell strangers how mad you are?

From WBEZ Chicago, this is an hour of stories with some very upset, anonymous people who we get to know a little bit. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: Act one, "Ask Not for Whom the Bell Trolls. It Trolls for Thee." Let's begin with the worst case scenario of things that can happen on the internet with a troll. In fact, a kind of exceptional troll. Trolls, of course, are people who post hate and abuse online. They use comments sections in social media to hound people and shriek at people.

Studies show that both men and women are harassed online, but women get way more malicious messages. And they're way more likely to be stalked online or sexually harassed. Lindy West is a writer who's written for a lot of places like Jezebel and GQ and The Guardian. Her work is online, so she is very familiar with internet trolls and she has our story.

Quick warning to podcast listeners. From this point forward, we are not going to beep anything in today's show. If you prefer a beeped version of our show, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Here's Lindy.

Lindy West

(HOST) LINDY WEST: One midsummer afternoon in 2013, I got a message on Twitter from my dead dad. I don't remember what it said exactly and I didn't keep a copy for my scrapbook, but it was mean. And my dad was never mean, so it couldn't really be from him. Also, he was dead.

Just 18 months earlier, I'd watched him turn gray and drown in his own lungs. So I was, like, 80% sure. And I don't believe in heaven. And even if I did, I'd hope to god they don't have fucking Twitter there. It's heaven. Go play chocolate badminton on a cloud with Jerry Orbach and your childhood cat.

But there was a message. Some context. In the summer of 2013, in certain circles of the internet, comedians and feminists were at war over rape jokes. Being both a comedy writer and a committed feminist killjoy, I weighed in with an article in which I said that I think a lot of male comedians are careless with the subject of rape.

Here's just a sample of the responses I got on social media. A quick warning-- these are internet comments about rape, so it's going to suck. "I love how the bitch complaining about rape is the exact kind of bitch that would never be raped." "Holes like this make me want to commit rape out of anger." "I just want to rape her with a traffic cone."

"No one would want to rape that fat, disgusting mess." "Kill yourself." "I want to put an apple into that mouth of yours and take a huge stick and slide it through your body and roast you." "That big bitch is bitter that no one wants to rape her."

It went on like that for weeks. It's something I'm used to. I have to be. Being insulted and threatened online is part of my job, which is not to say it doesn't hurt. It does. It feels, well, exactly like you'd imagine it would feel to have someone call you a fat cunt every day of your life.

When I got that message from my dad, it was well into rape joke summer. I was eating 30 rape threats for breakfast at that point. Or more accurately, "you're fatter than the girls I usually rape" threats. And I thought I was coping. But if you get a blade sharp enough, it'll cut through anything.

The account was called PawWestDonezo. Paw West because his name was Paul West. And Donezo because, I guess, he was done. He was done being alive, done doing crossword puzzles, done forcing me to sing duets at dinner parties. Done writing little poems on the back of every receipt. Done being my dad.

The little bio on Twitter read, "embarrassed father of an idiot." Other two kids are fine, though. His location-- dirt hole in Seattle. The profile photo was a familiar picture of him. He's sitting at his piano smiling in the living room of the house where I grew up.

The day they sold that house, when I was 25, I sat on the stairs and sobbed harder than I ever had before. Because a place is kind of like a person, you know? It felt like death. I wouldn't cry that hard again until December 12, 2011, when I'd learn that a place is not like a person at all. Only a person is a person. Only a death is really a death.

My dad lost consciousness on a Saturday night. That afternoon, when we could feel his lucidity slipping, we called my brother in Boston. You were such a special little boy, he said. I love you very much. He didn't say very many things after that. I would give anything for one more sentence. I would give anything for 140 more characters.

The person who made the PawWestDonezo account clearly put some time into it. They'd researched my father and my family. They'd found out his name.

And then they figured out which Paul West he was among all the Paul Wests on the internet. They knew that I have a brother and a sister. And if they knew all that, they must have known how recently we'd lost my dad.

Conventional wisdom says never feed the trolls. Don't respond. It's what they want. I do that. It doesn't help.

I could just stop reading comments altogether, but sometimes I get threatening ones. Like the other day, someone said I should get Charlie Hebdoed. Colleagues of mine have had their addresses published online, had trolls actually show up in person at their public events. If I don't read comments, how will I know when they've crossed the line?

I could just stop writing altogether. I've thought about it. But it seems to me that our silence is what the trolls want.

Faced with PawWestDonezo, I was stuck with the question, what should I do? If I respond, I'm a sucker. But if I don't respond, I'm a punching bag.

So I did what you're not supposed to do. I fed the troll. I wrote about PawWestDonezo in an article for Jezebel.com. I wrote sadly, candidly, angrily about how much it hurt. How much that troll had succeeded.

And then something amazing happened. The morning after that post went up, I got an email. "Hey, Lindy, I don't know why or even when I started trolling you. It wasn't because of your stance on rape jokes. I don't find them funny, either.

I think my anger towards you stems from your happiness with your own being. It offended me because it served to highlight my unhappiness with my own self. I have emailed you through two other Gmail accounts just to send you idiotic insults. I apologize for that.

I created the PawWestDonezo@gmail.com account and Twitter account. I have deleted both. I can't say sorry enough. It was the lowest thing I had ever done.

When you included it in your latest Jezebel article, it finally hit me. There is a living, breathing human being who is reading this shit. I'm attacking someone who never harmed me in any way and for no reason whatsoever.

I'm done being a troll. Again, I apologize. I made a donation in memory to your dad. I wish you the best."

They attached a receipt for a $50 donation to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, where my dad was treated. I guess he found that out in his research, too. It was designated Memorial Paul West. I didn't know what to say. I wrote, "Is this real? If so, thank you."

The troll wrote back one more time, apologized again, and this time, he gave me his real name. I could have posted it online, which he knew. But I didn't and I'm not going to be saying it here, either.

That was almost 18 months ago. But I still think about it all the time. Because I still get trolled every day. If I could get through to one troll-- the meanest one I ever had-- couldn't I feasibly get through to any of them? All of them? Was he special or did I do something right? I wonder how he would tell me to respond to the people trolling me today. I wish I could ask him. But then I realized, I could.

Lindy West

(HOST) LINDY WEST: This is me in a studio with producer Chana Joffe-Walt and a phone.

[DIAL TONE SOUNDS]

(HOST) LINDY WEST: I asked him why he chose me. He'd said in his email that it wasn't because of the rape joke thing. So what exactly did I do?

Lindy West

(HOST) LINDY WEST: I write a lot about body image. About the stigma and discrimination that fat people face. About being a fat woman. He told me that, at the time, he was about 75 pounds heavier than he wanted to be. He hated his body. He was miserable. And reading about fat people-- particularly fat women-- accepting and loving themselves as they were infuriated him for reasons he couldn't articulate at the time.

Lindy West

(HOST) LINDY WEST: I asked him if he felt that way because I'm a woman.

Lindy West

(HOST) LINDY WEST: In my experience, if you call a troll a misogynist, he'll almost invariably say, oh, I don't hate women. I just hate what you're saying. And what that other woman is saying. And that woman. And that one. For totally unrelated reasons.

So it was satisfying, at least, to hear him admit that, yeah, he hated women. He says he doesn't troll anymore and that he's really changed. He tells me that period of time-- when he was trolling me for being loud and fat-- was a low point for him.

He hated his body. His girlfriend dumped him. He spent every day in front of a computer at an unfulfilling job. A passionless life, he called it.

And then gradually, he changed. He enrolled in graduate school. He found a new relationship. He started teaching little kids. He had a purpose. Slowly, his interest in trolling dried up.

We verified nearly everything that he told us about himself, except did he really stop trolling? I have no way of knowing, but I believe him. It felt true. And if this was all a con, it's one that cost him a $50 charity donation.

We talked for over two hours. And I spent a lot of time trying to get him to walk me through his transgressions in detail. The actual physical and mental steps and how he justified it all to himself. I felt like if I could just get the specifics-- gather them up and hold them in my hands-- then maybe I could start to understand all the people who are still trolling me.

Lindy West

(HOST) LINDY WEST: Honestly, I did have some solace. I forgave him. I felt sorry for him. It's so difficult to believe that anyone ever really changes. And he did it. I found immense comfort in that.

Toward the end of our conversation, I remembered that, in his email, he confessed that he'd harassed me from multiple troll accounts, not just PawWestDonezo.

Did I ever write back? Was there anything I didn't know? He said, yeah. One time, he'd sent something mean from his personal account and I retweeted it to all my 40,000 followers. He was mortified.

Lindy West

(HOST) LINDY WEST: At this point, my producer Chana, who'd been listening, couldn't stop herself from jumping in.

Lindy West

(HOST) LINDY WEST: It felt really easy-- comfortable, even-- to talk to my troll. I liked him and I didn't know what to do with that. It's frightening to discover that he's so normal. He has female co-workers who enjoy his company. He has a real live girlfriend who loves him. They have no idea that he used to go online and traumatize women for fun.

Trolls live among us. I've gotten anonymous comments from people saying they met me at a movie theater and I was a bitch or they served me at a restaurant and my boobs aren't as big as they look in pictures. People say it doesn't matter what happens on the internet-- that it's not real life. But thanks to internet trolls, I'm perpetually reminded that the boundary between the civilized world and our worst selves is just an illusion.

Trolls still waste my time and tax my mental health on a daily basis. But honestly, I don't wish them any pain. Their pain is what got us here in the first place. That's what I learned from my troll.

If what he said is true-- that he just needed to find some meaning in his life-- then what a heartbreaking diagnosis for all the people who are still at it. I can't give purpose and fulfillment to millions of anonymous strangers. But I can remember not to lose sight of their humanity the way that they lost sight of mine.

Humans can be reached. I have proof. Empathy, boldness, kindness-- those are things I learned from my dad, though he never knew how much I'd need them. Or maybe he did.

He was a jazz musician and when I was born he wrote a song about me. And listening to it now, it feels like he wrote it for just this moment. I'll give the last word to him.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: Lindy West in Seattle. So since we first ran Lindy's story a year ago, something interesting happened. Her story spurred a discussion inside Twitter that led its CEO at the time, Dick Costolo, to write a memo to employees that was leaked to the public.

It said, quote, "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls. And we've sucked at it for years. It's no secret. And the rest of the world talks about it every day.

I'm frankly ashamed of how poorly we've dealt with this issue. It's absurd. There's no excuse for it." In the months since then, Twitter has introduced some new anti-bullying tools and policies. They've gotten decidedly mixed reviews, like "not far enough."

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: Act two, "Freedom Fries." So the comments that we get from our listeners are usually nowhere as vicious as what Lindy West gets on a daily basis. But for a while now, the women on our staff have been getting emails like this one.

Quote, "The voice of Chana Joffe-Walt is just too much to bear and I turn off any episode she's on. A quick bit of research found an appropriate description, which is vocal fry. How can This American Life have this on the show? It escapes me."

Vocal fry has gotten a bit of coverage on Public Radio in the last year, but if you have no idea what this is talking about, here's a clip of Chana.

Chana Joffe-Walt

(HOST) CHANA JOFFE-WALT: And Thompson kept hearing that term-- school to prison pipeline.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: OK. Hear the way that her voice kind of creaks on the word pipeline? That's vocal fry.

Chana Joffe-Walt

(HOST) CHANA JOFFE-WALT: Pipeline.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: But it's not just Chana. A man wrote us in November, quote, "Vocal fry is a growing fad among young American women. Miki Meek provides a vivid and grating example of this unfortunate affectation." Miki, by the way, sounds like this.

Miki Meek

(HOST) MIKI MEEK: She'd never experienced anything outside the church. And she basically checked out on Will and the kids.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: Somebody wrote us about Alix Spiegel, who's been on our show many, many times. Now co-hosts the NPR science program Invisibilia. Quote, "Perhaps Alix could cover the vocal fry epidemic. It'd be really interesting to hear her take, as she is clearly a victim herself." For the record, here is Alix.

Alix Spiegel

(HOST) ALIX SPIEGEL: Because Roxanne was the only one supporting her young daughter, she had to be able to work.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: Elna Baker, Mary Beth Kerschner, Starlee Kine, Yowei Shaw. When investigative reporter Susan Zalkind was on our show last year with the story of the FBI shooting a man connected to the Boston Marathon bombers, she sounded like this.

Susan Zalkind

(HOST) SUSAN ZALKIND: But Ibrahim also got arrested for beating a guy unconscious over a parking space at a mall in Florida.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: A woman wrote in, quote, "The growl in the woman's voice was so annoying that I turned it off." A man wrote, quote, "Listen, I know there's pressure to hire females-- in particular, young females just out of college. And besides, they're likely to work for less money.

But do you have to choose the most irritating voices in the English speaking world? I mean, are you forced to? Or maybe, as I imagine, NPR runs national contests looking for them."

The term vocal fry started to get wide usage in 2011 after a study of 34 college students at Long Island University found that 2/3 of them had it, usually at the ends of sentences. A reporter wrote a story about that study at the website of Science Magazine. Gawker, Huffington Post, Boing Boing, and other sites linked to it. And within days, it became the most popular article ever published on the Science Magazine website and its 15 years. Other media glommed on.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: This story on The Today Show raises the possibility that talking this way harms young women's voices. Since then, many researchers have said this doesn't seem to be true. The Today Show story also says this only affects women.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: There's now robust evidence that men do this, too. And like a lot of the other coverage, The Today Show story pathologizes vocal fry-- says that it's some kind of problem instead of just the way that some people talk. And it teaches viewers to spot it. Today Show host Matt Lauer starts a segment saying that he's never heard of this and ends it saying he'd never noticed it before and now he's going to be on the alert for it.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: The Today Show story and other stories treat vocal fry as if it's a new phenomenon-- on the rise, a fad, an epidemic. But as a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, Mark Lieberman, has pointed out, there is still no evidence of that-- pro or con. No evidence that it is more common now than it's always been.

What's striking in the dozens of emails about vocal fry that we've gotten here at our radio show is how vehement people are. These are some of the angriest emails we ever get. They call these women's voices unbearable, excruciating, annoyingly adolescent, beyond annoying, difficult to pay attention. So severe as to cause discomfort.

Can't stand the pain, distractingly disgusting. Could not get over how annoyed I was. I am so appalled. Detracts from the credibility of the journalist. Degrades the value of the reportage. It's a choice-- very unprofessional.

Stephanie Foo

(HOST) STEPHANIE FOO: Lately, every time I get together with female radio producers, it's just like comparing war stories.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: That's Stephanie Foo, one of the younger producers here on our show.

Stephanie Foo

(HOST) STEPHANIE FOO: It's just listing off, oh, somebody said this about me-- my voice-- this week. Somebody said I sound like a stoner 13-year-old. Somebody said that my voice sounds like driving on gravel. Somebody said they wanted to kill themselves hearing my voice.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: Listeners have always complained about young women reporting on our show. They used to complain about reporters using the word like and about upspeak, which is when you put a question mark at the end of a sentence and talk like this?

But we don't get many emails like that anymore. People who don't like listening to young women on the radio have moved on to vocal fry.

Chana Joffe-Walt

(HOST) CHANA JOFFE-WALT: I just feel like, my voice? Really? Like--

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: This is producer Chana Joffe-Walt. Remember, I read a letter from a listener who found her voice "too much to bear." Chana says that it's fine with her if somebody has a problem with her reporting or her writing or her interviewing. But her voice?

Chana Joffe-Walt

(HOST) CHANA JOFFE-WALT: I'm just trying to speak. Like literally, the way that the voice comes out of my mouth bothers you? What am I supposed to do about that? And like, even now, as we're speaking about it, I am noticing every single time I do it.

And then hating every single time I do it and trying not to do it. But trying not to do it is impossible because it's the way that I talk. Because it's my actual voice. It's crazy-making.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: It's funny. Until we started talking about it for this story, I never even noticed it in your voice. And then--

Chana Joffe-Walt

(HOST) CHANA JOFFE-WALT: And now you notice it every second.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: Yeah. Have you noticed that I do it, too?

Chana Joffe-Walt

(HOST) CHANA JOFFE-WALT: Not until right now.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: Yeah. Yeah. Even as I say these words.

Chana Joffe-Walt

(HOST) CHANA JOFFE-WALT: And I didn't notice it when other women do it, either, until I started to read about the phenomenon of vocal fry. And then I did notice it. And I find it annoying now when other people do it. I mean, I don't notice it all the time, but if I am thinking about it and hear other people do it-- other women do it, especially-- I become a woman who hates women.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: Wow. You're like-- it's like you've absorbed the messages of your oppressor.

Chana Joffe-Walt

(HOST) CHANA JOFFE-WALT: I hear it in you now.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: Yeah. I get criticized for a lot of things in the emails to the show. No one has ever pointed this out.

Chana Joffe-Walt

(HOST) CHANA JOFFE-WALT: That's completely unsurprising.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: Don't you think it's just sexism?

Chana Joffe-Walt

(HOST) CHANA JOFFE-WALT: Yes. I think it taps into some deep part of people's selves where they don't want to hear young women-- including me. Like, it taps into that in me.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: A few years ago, a linguist named Penny Eckert from Stanford University heard a young woman at NPR and was surprised to hear somebody speaking in such a casual style with so much vocal fry about serious news. And she thought, well, she shouldn't be on NPR. She doesn't sound authoritative.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: So she did a little study-- a preliminary study. She played clips of a Marketplace reporter named Sally Herships for 584 people. And she asked them to rate how authoritative the reporter sounded. The results-- people under 40 heard it very differently than people over 40.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: So if people are having a problem with these reporters on the radio, what it means is they're old.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: She says the same thing happened with upspeak and with the word like. Reporters would call her about these things. They'd point to them as a problem with young women, when young men do all that also.

She says people get worked up about this stuff, but it's just part of life. As we age, we fall out of touch with how younger people speak. Her advice to everybody, including herself? Get over it.

Coming up. You know what people really love on the internet? Little baby animals. So why would they be yelling at each other about that? That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show-- and are you only listening to the vocal fry in my voice right now and not the actual words that I'm saying?

Today's show-- "If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say, Say It in All Caps." This story's about internet commenters. We've arrived at act three of our program.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: Act three, "Words of Prey." So every few months, it seems there's some study that gets released saying that something like 15% of the internet is just cats-- cat videos, cat pictures. Or maybe it's 1% is cats or maybe it's some other number that really just seems crazy.

My point is the internet loves animals. With that in mind, here's Jonathan Menjivar with this story that we first broadcast a year ago.

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: In the world of wildlife animal cams, the Woods Hole Osprey cam is a bit player. It's certainly no Panda Cam. All over the Earth, there are web cams trained on bison, penguins-- I just watched a jellyfish one that's useful if you want to feel stoned at your desk.

But until last summer, the Osprey Cam at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution-- most people just call it WHOI-- their camera didn't get much traffic. The cam was started about a decade ago as a kind of pet project of a woman who worked at WHOI. She died in 2009.

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: This is Jeffrey Brodeur. He works at WHOI.

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: Sherri was only 41. After her death, Jeffrey took over responsibility for the camera. And for three years, no bird showed up.

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: One year, a male and female showed up. But they didn't breed. They returned a year later. And on April 19, 2014, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, the first egg arrived. At least, that's according to one account on a message board. Excitement around the nest grew on the internet. Then a second egg arrived, and then a third.

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: Featherheads-- that's apparently what some osprey addicts call themselves. They started putting videos on YouTube and posting play-by-play action of everything that was happening in the nest. 5:44 AM-- "Two minutes into fourth video and it's looking very much like a normal feeding." 5:45 AM-- "All three are clustered around and I think at least two are being fed. I also think the one on the left isn't getting as much now as the one that was fed more earlier." 5:46 AM-- "Adult paused for a second and looked around."

On the message boards, people started posting screenshots of things they were seeing-- when the nestlings ate, when they pooped. So all these eyes were on the nest. People were excited. And then--

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: The mom-- she'd bring fish to the nest, but she seemed to be hoarding them, not sharing with the nestlings.

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: Now, if this happened in a forest, it's just another day for nature. But it wasn't happening in a forest. It was happening on the internet.

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: I've watched the videos and they are hard to take. It's not a lion taking down a gazelle because he's hungry. This is a mother attacking her kids, seemingly for no reason. And not just attacking them-- starving them. When the dad brings fish to the nest, the mother often eats most of the fish before she offers the nestlings anything.

By the end of the summer, a message board devoted to the cam that had been quiet for years suddenly had hundreds of pages of posts. There are at least 40 osprey cams around the US. And now, Jeffrey was sitting on the Real Housewives of osprey cams. Woods Hole had the train wreck that everyone wanted to watch.

People on the message boards clearly knew a ton about osprey, but they couldn't help themselves from attaching human motives to the mother's actions. One person wrote, "Note how she looks at them at times, almost like daring them to move."

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: A poster on July 10 wrote, "I wish someone would listen to me already. I think this is not their parent. That is why she is attacking them and there has been no food delivery. The same thing happened with a bald eagle nest in Shepherdtown, Virginia." They mean Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

"The intruder does not want them. So someone needs to contact Cape Cod Wildlife and give them a heads up or you may have three chicks that perish. If you guys won't, I will."

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: Jeffrey is not an osprey expert. He does outreach for WHOI. And at WHOI, they study ocean life, not birds. So Jeffrey consulted osprey experts around the country and they all told him two things.

One, they'd never seen an osprey behave this way before. And two, the experts agreed that Jeffrey and WHOI should not intervene. Don't give the nestlings food. Don't remove them. WHOI didn't have any place to put them, anyhow, and ospreys do terribly in captivity.

Jeffrey let the message boards know all this. But some featherheads still called for WHOI to intervene. Especially once the nestlings got hungry enough that they started attacking each other, fighting over food.

People wanted answers and they started theorizing. There had been big storms in the area that could have made it hard to find fish. Maybe three nestlings was just too much for the mom to handle and she was stressed out. Maybe it was the dad. Maybe he was stepping out on Momzilla and working another nest on the side.

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: Now, imagine being Jeffrey. You're a communications guy at this place that doesn't even specialize in birds. Then your co-worker dies and you take over this bird cam that was dear to her.

And before you know it, people from all over the world are mad at you and demanding action. Jeffrey-- he's a nice guy, diplomatic. The most I could get out of him was that he was frustrated over all this.

But at the time, Jeffrey phoned one of the webcam viewers, who then posted this on the message board. Quote, "Jeff Brodeur just called me. Called, not emailed.

He is furious. He's been getting tons of nasty threatening emails from cam viewers demanding the chicks or female be removed from the nest. Someone sent out an email to the entire staff saying they are inhumane. Jeff is going to shut the cam off if the emails don't stop."

Jeffrey didn't shut the cam off, but he posted a warning to viewers that they might see behavior they'd find upsetting. If they don't like it, he thought, they could just stop watching.

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: And then things really blew up when one of the nestlings got its talon caught on a balloon string that was in the nest. Now the nestling was even more vulnerable to the mother's attacks.

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: Jeffrey was with his whole family on Martha's Vineyard and his phone rang.

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: The woman told him, osprey in need don't get vacations.

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: Jeffrey wrote that he was attached to them, too. Partly because he misses the woman who helped start the cam and who ran it until she died at 41. Every time he sees the birds, he wrote, he thinks of her.

Jonathan Menjivar

(HOST) JONATHAN MENJIVAR: That sort of worked. Most of the featherheads stopped their chirping. The mother kept attacking the nestlings and they continued to attack each other. By the end of the summer, all three learned to fly and left the nest. One was found dead underneath a nearby tree. He was malnourished.

An osprey expert told me, nature is not cruel. That implies intent. It is harsh, unforgiving, and often random. Most of the Osprey Cam viewers knew all that. But still, it's hard not to view animals-- any animals-- through a human lens.

As one person posted, "Well, I'm one to humanize. I admit it. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I have human sympathies for the little one-- fledgling number three-- and I don't mind sharing that. Some have expressed their feelings about mom's attacks. We are humans, after all.

I've seen fledgling two go after fledgling three many times and would like to reach in and slap him upside the head. That is me humanizing the situation as it happens. Obviously, I can't do that, but I sure feel it. Yes, my posts have lots of humanizing. I'm human. I'm not afraid to show it."

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: Jonathan Menjivar. He's one of the producers of our program.

Well, this hour we've been hearing stories of people getting insulted and harassed in various ways on the internet. But can internet hate ever be helpful to a person? There's a new podcast called "Reply All." It spends a lot of time living among the haters and the liars and the dirty, dirty cheats of the world on the internet. And one of the hosts of the podcast "Reply All," PJ Vogt, has this story.

Pj Vogt

(HOST) PJ VOGT: Ignore whatever good things seem to be going on in your life. You're lousy, you're an imposter, and everybody in your life knows it.

Pj Vogt

(HOST) PJ VOGT: That voice told Paul that his life, which looked-- from the outside-- pretty normal, was teetering on the edge of a huge disaster.

Pj Vogt

(HOST) PJ VOGT: Paul programmed software and so he decided what he needed to do about his anxiety was to treat it like an IT problem that needed troubleshooting.

Pj Vogt

(HOST) PJ VOGT: Anxiety Box. It's a website. Paul's technological solution to the self-doubting criticism swirling around in his head.

Pj Vogt

(HOST) PJ VOGT: Not emails soothing you about your anxiety. Emails that are actually sent from a personified version of your anxiety that lived on a website. Paul coded in all these tiny sentence fragments that the website could use to automatically construct emails.

Pj Vogt

(HOST) PJ VOGT: Those sound fragments were meant to give his robot the perfect voice-- the voice of a ruthlessly cheerful underminer. An underminer who knew his specific anxieties-- the work deadlines he was blowing, the weight he couldn't seem to lose-- and could taunt him about them.

Pj Vogt

(HOST) PJ VOGT: Remember, Paul set it up so that he'd get these messages, on average, 12 times a day. 12 times a day, his phone would ping and there'd be a new attack waiting. While he was eating breakfast-- ping.

Pj Vogt

(HOST) PJ VOGT: When he was at work, ping.

Pj Vogt

(HOST) PJ VOGT: While he was watching his kids, ping.

Pj Vogt

(HOST) PJ VOGT: When he was getting ready for bed, ping.

Pj Vogt

(HOST) PJ VOGT: Seeing the voice in his head-- seeing its opinion of him actually written out-- it seemed crazy that he'd ever believed that what it was saying about him was true.

Pj Vogt

(HOST) PJ VOGT: The notion that you can cure your anxiety without therapy, without drugs, just by trolling yourself. Who'd have thought?

Pj Vogt

(HOST) PJ VOGT: Paul found that when he took the nasty voices inside his head and gave them a home outside of it-- a home on the internet, where tens of millions of other nasty voices live, they couldn't hurt him any more.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: PJ Vogt is one of the hosts of "Reply All." They find such great stories. If you have not heard them yet, you might start with an episode called, "Shine On, You Crazy Goldman," which goes to a very surprising place. "Reply All."

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: Well, our program was produced today by Stephanie Foo and myself, with Sean Cole, Chana Jaffe-Walt, Sarah Koenig, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Editing help from Joel Lovell and Joe Richman.

Our technical director is Matt Tierney. Production help from Lilly Sullivan and Michael Garofalo. Seth Lind is our director of operations. Emily Condon's our production manager.

Elise Bergerson is our business operations manager. Elna Baker scouts stories for the show. Kimberly Henderson is our office coordinator. Research help from Michelle Harris and Christopher Switala. Music help from Damian Graef from Rob Geddis.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. His latest hobby? Teaching hot yoga in hell.

Ira Glass

(HOST) IRA GLASS: I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.