Soon after Joe Biden tapped Kamala Harris to join the 2020 Democratic ticket, policy wonks inside Meta discovered a problem.
Users had flooded Facebook and Instagram with racist and sexist attacks on Harris, then a senator from California: A deluge of posts and images argued that she was secretly a man, questioned whether she was Black and implied that she was promiscuous. The torrent caught the attention of women lawmakers, including Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.), then-Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who complained in private meetings with company officials that posts about female politicians seemed to evade Meta’s detection and skirt its content rules.
Lawmakers had data to back that up. One report looking at two months of posts from the end of 2020 on several social media platforms, including Twitter, Reddit and 4chan, found more than 336,000 pieces of “abusive content,” including false sexual narratives, targeting female politicians. Nearly 80 percent of posts focused on Harris, according to the report by the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank.
The influx prompted Meta to change its policies — a shift that has not previously been reported. Backed by then-chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, the company clarified its internal guidelines to bar images sexualizing women politicians, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private company matters.
Four years later, as Vice President Harris campaigns to succeed President Biden in the Oval Office, she is facing another onslaught of online attacks. Social media users have called for her to be raped or killed; others have spread false claims about her sexual history or argued that her success is the product of sexual favors. Hashtags such as #HeelsUpHarris and #JoeAndTheHoe proliferate on social media.
Doctored or misrepresented photos falsely allege that Harris has had relationships with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, who has been accused of sex trafficking. Some of these narratives have been elevated by powerful political actors, including conservative commentator Matt Walsh and former president Donald Trump.
As a target of vicious and persistent online sexual harassment, Harris has a perspective that is unique in presidential politics. She also has a long history of promoting new laws and initiatives that aim to make it easier for victims of digital harassment to find justice — efforts that have achieved mixed success. Now, some activists hope that as president, Harris would be uniquely positioned to bring attention to a long-ignored issue.
Especially as California attorney general, Harris made pushing companies to limit abusive or allegedly harmful content a hallmark of her political career. She prosecuted executives from thenow-defunct classified site Backpage for allowing ads for sexual services. She compelled tech companies to protect victims whose intimate images had been posted online without their consent, a phenomenon known as “revenge porn.” And she backed legislation that expanded the ability of California police to investigate revenge-porn crimes.
“She helped us move the needle,” said Danielle Keats Citron, author of the book “Hate Crimes In Cyberspace.” “She made a huge impact on how we see and how we tackle online abuse that involves vulnerable people.”
Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that “the media’s negative portrayal of President Trump and his treatment of women is entirely false” before adding that he is “loved by millions of women across the country.” The Harris campaign declined to comment on the story.
In 2010, as San Francisco district attorney, Harris was worried about a different kind of internet abuse. She backed a bill proposing to ban sex offender registrants from using social networking websites, where they could find children to abuse in the future.
“Yesterday’s playground has turned into today’s social networking site,” Harris said at a news conference at the time. “Just like we have rules and laws around how we are going to keep children safe on a playground, so too do we need rules and laws about how we are going to ensure that they will be safe when they use this technology.”
The bill didn’t pass, but it became one of several legislative and policy efforts backed by Harris to fight internet abuse.
Her work in this space took off after she was elected as California attorney general in 2010.
For years, activists had pushed tech companies to remove sexual images of women that were posted without their consent. Initially, some tech companies balked at removing nonconsensual images over concerns they might suppress free expression, said Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at George Washington University, who has advocated for stronger revenge-porn laws.
In December 2013, Harris set her sights on Kevin Christopher Bollaert, the founder of the cyber-exploitation website ugotposted.com. The business invited people to post racy photos of their former romantic partners and then charged the victims hundreds of dollars to have the photos removed.
While California passed one of the nation’s first laws making it a crime to distribute intimate images of people without their consent, the rule required prosecutors to prove the graphic images were posted “with the intent to cause serious emotional distress.” The law also did not cover any photos that had originally been taken by the victims themselves.
Harris got around those legal limitations by charging Bollaert with 31 felony counts of conspiring to commit identity theft and extorting victims. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Other prosecutions by Harris were more controversial. In 2016, she charged Carl Ferrer, the CEO and other executives of Backpage.com, for allowing users to post “escort services” ads, which she argued turned the site into “an online brothel” generating “millions of dollars off the illegal sex trade.” In 2018, Ferrer, pleaded guilty in state courts in California and Texas and federal court to charges of money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution.
She echoed this push when, as a senator, Harris was one of 70 co-sponsors of SESTA-FOSTA, a 2018 law enabling lawsuitsand state criminal cases against websites hosting sex-trafficking ads.
Critics argued at the time the moves were an assault on free speech, critically weakening the legal immunity granted to tech companies for content posted on their platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Others said the changes made the lives of sex workers worse, forcing them to find clients in less safe ways, including the streets.
“It was an absolute catastrophe for adult consensual sex workers as well as people who were being exploited because those people can’t make an income — that puts them at risk from their abusers,” said Blair Hopkins, executive director of the Sex Worker Outreach Project Behind Bars, which advocates legalizing the sex trade.
As her office brought more cases against website operators, Harris and her staff began to seek new ways to crack down on online abuse. Because internet laws limited how much Harris could do in the courtroom, she launched a task force to pressure companies to voluntarily take action against online abuse against women.
“She likes to operate with carrots rather than sticks,” said Citron, who Harris tapped to help launch the task force.
In February 2015, Harris convened representatives from roughly 50 companies, along with state legislators, law enforcement leaders and lawyers representing victims, in a dingy and dimly lit basement conference room of the California Department of Justice office in San Francisco.
The goal, Harris said, was to figure out the best way to educate victims and law enforcement on how to respond to online exploitation, and push tech companies and lawmakers to fill in any regulatory and policy gaps.
Harris called on them to reject the term “revenge porn,” which implies that recorded sexual activity involving the victims is a form of pornography, which by definition is meant for distribution. Instead, she asked the tech companies to sign on to a statement of principles to fight what she called “cyber exploitation.”
Eight months later, the attorney general’s office announced a new online information hub for victims to learn how to get their photos taken down. The state also passed two laws that Harris supported, including one that expanded law enforcement’s ability to demand and destroy images in cyber exploitation cases and another that expanded police officers’ ability to investigate exploitation crimes.
That year, Meta — then called Facebook — and Twitter announced policies banning revenge porn on their social networks. Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft started to remove revenge porn from their search engines.
Some of that work continued after Harris became vice president. In June 2022, she became the face of a White House task force aimed at helping the federal government address “gender-based online harms.” As part of that effort, the Justice Department funded a national helpline for survivors of image-based sexual abuse, operated by the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative.
If Harris wins the White House, advocates hope her administration would take bolder action against the unique forms of internet harassment and exploitation women and young girls face — a phenomenon that permeates the race.
“She is maybe the first candidate who’s really become a target of deepfake misinformation,” said Franks, the president of the anti-revenge-porn group Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. “And you have maybe the first candidate who, on the other side, who relies on exactly that kind of misinformation.”
Cat Zakrzewski contributed reporting.