Online harassment is not just a social media problem; it’s a systems failure that shapes who runs, who stays, and who leads. This piece examines how digital violence disproportionately impacts Black women in politics, operates as a structural barrier to women’s political power, and outlines the reforms needed to build safer, more equitable pathways to leadership as we head into a critical election cycle.

Online and technology-facilitated violence is quietly becoming one of the most consequential forces shaping American democracy. It determines who feels safe enough to run, whose leadership is undermined, and who is pushed out before their work is done. For Black women, these harms are not incidental — they are structural, signaling that the systems governing our political and digital spaces were never designed with their safety in mind. 

RepresentWomen’s research has long shown that women’s political representation does not stall because women lack ambition. It stalls because the rules — electoral, institutional, and digital — fail to protect those targeted most. Today, online violence stands as one of the clearest and most urgent examples of a system that must be redesigned if we want a democracy where women can run, win, serve, and lead on equal footing. 

To understand how these harms operate and what structural reform must look like, we turned to four women whose expertise spans lived experience, political science, extremism research, and social psychology. Their insights reveal not only how online violence functions as a barrier, but also what it will take to build systems capable of protecting Black women’s political power. 

This installment of our Black Women in Politics series draws on in-depth conversations with:

• Former Vermont legislator, Kiah Morris,
• Political scientist, Dr. Nadia E. Brown,
• Extremism researcher, Director of Democracy Protection, Dr. Hanah Stiverson, and
• Feminist psychologist, Dr. Asia Eaton.

Together, they illuminate a truth we can no longer afford to treat as anecdotal or individual: Online violence is a systems-level crisis with profound implications for representation, democratic participation, and the health of our democracy itself.

Kiah’s Story: Courage, Visibility, and a Rising Tide of Threats

Pictured: Kiah Morris, Former Vermont Elected Official in the House of Representatives. Source: LinkedIn. 

When Kiah Morris first ran for the Vermont House of Representatives, elected office was not a lifelong goal.

“My experience in joining into the political fray was one that was quite unexpected,” she recalls. “It wasn’t something that I’d been particularly pursuing as a goal… [But] I joined a leadership organization which really tries to train some of United States' most brightest women and femmes into leadership roles.” 

It was during this time that leaders in the space suggested she consider running for elected office. She recalls being told, ‘[T]hat passion you have for your community and for your state, [and] the people… that sounds like something that would be perfect to be in political office.’” 

So, Kiah took heed of their encouragement and entered Emerge Vermont’s inaugural cohort. As she entered the political arena for the first time, she ran a campaign built on “brutal honesty” and deep community connection.

“I connected with folks from all sectors, some folks who had never seen a politician knock on their door in almost two decades,” she says. “They knew at the end of the day I was going to fight like hell for our community and for the community’s needs.”

As a queer Black femme leading in a predominantly white state, she quickly became a powerful symbol and voice. And, once elected, true to her promise, she fought for her constituents tirelessly. On just her second day in office, she publicly challenged the governor and rebuked his proposals, noting that they would negatively impact her community. Making her voice known out the gate, she confidently pushed back, stating:

“I can’t let that stand… on behalf of my people and on behalf of those that I represent, we have to do better.”

Her political courage and effectiveness drew bipartisan support and calls to run for higher office. But that visibility came with a cost.

“Things started happening that were showing that even in this predominantly white state, where I was one of a few [Black people], we were not safe,” she explains. “And that question of safety was 1000% rooted in race and in racism and gendered racism [and in] gendered violence.”

As harassment escalated, she became a target for individuals and networks far beyond Vermont. She describes discovering that:

• Her name and family were circulating on the dark web;
• Violent and racist images — including cartoon depictions of her with bullet holes in her face, swastikas, and nooses — were being shared; and
• Threats poured in across all social media platforms, including even LinkedIn. 

The message this sent to her community was chilling:

“If this person who’s considered to be one of the most powerful in our state is not able to find the kind of protections they need, then what does that mean for the rest of us? Then we are absolutely not safe.”

For Kiah, the continual harassment had a profoundly negative impact on her day-to-day life.

“It became much more acute once I started experiencing the harassment, once it also started bleeding into my real life,” she said. “And once I realized that the system was not set up, [and] is still not set up in many, many places to be able to truly protect oneself in these types of experiences, I saw the physical and the mental toll it was taking on me. I saw the physical toll it was taking on my family. I saw and heard my mother's tears on the phone when she'd say, ‘Why are you still there? Why are you still living in this place?’ Because she's worried about her daughter being killed on a daily basis, and that to me is one of the most important things.”

Eventually, facing threats that institutions could not or would not address, Kiah stepped down — not because she wanted to leave, but because every system designed to support public leadership had failed her.

From the beginning, Kiah’s story was not simply one of personal tragedy, but a structural story highlighting a deep systemic failure. A talented Black woman leader was forced from office not by voters, but by a combination of digital abuse, institutional inaction, and a broken political system.

What Kiah’s Story Reveals About Systemic Gaps

Pictured: James Lawton and Kiah Morris in Bennington in August 2019. Source: The VT Digger 

Kiah’s story matters both as a lived experience and as a window into the systems that shape — and often constrain — Black women’s ability to run, serve, and lead. Her narrative does not just accompany the structural analysis; it grounds it.

Kiah’s experience makes visible several overlapping systems failures:

• Campaign systems treated safety as an individual responsibility, rather than a structural need.
• Legislative systems did not function as secure workplaces; Vermont’s State House, for example, lacked basic security infrastructure.
• Legal systems prioritized an expansive reading of “free speech” while minimizing the real harm of racist and violent imagery.
• Digital systems allowed harassment, doxxing, and dark-web targeting to spread faster than any remedy.

“We see an institution as a stagnation,” she says. “We see a reticence to make change. We see a hesitancy to lean into what true equity and access means. It’s not just saying there’s a seat available for someone to run for. What are the other barriers that are going to keep those individuals from actually getting into place, serving with their political courage intact and their personhood intact as well?” [Audio clip to accompany on social media] 

Kiah explains that the problem is not confined to campaigns; it is embedded across government systems and reverberates outward beyond a single incident. The trauma of being silenced or rendered invisible, she notes, is not momentary — it becomes structural. 

“[These are] the pieces not only missing in the political sphere, but in so many places in government. Recognizing that trauma happens when you are silenced, when you are created invisible — it is one that has lasting effects that go far deeper than even just the impacts of what happens to one person in that space,” Kiah shared. “That happens throughout systems…. if the precedent isn't challenged, then nothing changes. So if they see that [legal and governmental system] can succeed here in shutting things down, what does that somatically do to people who feel like they want to press against those oppressive systems?”

Kiah’s insight underscores a central truth: when systems allow harm to go unchecked, they send a message about who is safe to lead and who is not. This is how isolated incidents become institutional patterns that deter participation and limit representation. 

And this is why her story matters so deeply to our work. At RepresentWomen, we see Kiah’s experience as a clear example of how online violence, institutional stagnation, and outdated legal frameworks converge into a system that pushes Black women out of political leadership. Not because they lack the courage to press against oppressive systems, but because the systems were never designed to support, protect, or sustain their leadership. 

The threats Kiah faced, and the failures of the systems meant to protect her, reveal what this project seeks to clarify: just as electoral systems can suppress or enable representation, digital ecosystems can either support or systematically exclude women from political life, especially Black women.

This insight is central to RepresentWomen’s mission. Our work has long shown that barriers to women’s political power are not just personal or behavioral. They are structural, institutional, and systemic. Online harassment fits squarely into that framework, functioning as:

• A barrier to running (fear of exposure, lack of resources to prepare);
• A barrier to serving (constant threats, family impacts, burnout); and
• A barrier to leadership longevity (forced exits, shortened tenures, pipeline depletion).

In this way, online violence is not simply a social issue; it is a representation issue. It shapes who feels safe stepping forward, whose families can withstand the incurred risk, who has the institutional support to stay in office, and ultimately whose voices the public gets to hear.

Expert Lenses: How Systems Are Failing and How They Can Change

Kiah’s story is not isolated. The scholars we interviewed help us understand how structural choices at every level enable online violence to function as a barrier to representation, and how systems reforms can change that.

1. Democracy & Extremism – Dr. Hanah Stiverson

Pictured: Dr. Hanah Stiverson, is an Extremism Researcher at Human Rights First, where she provides expertise on misogyny and militarization within the U.S. antidemocratic far-right. She also co-authored a book, titled “Racist Zoombombing,” which details the racist hate speech and online harassment faced by users of the platform Zoom during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Courtesy photo. 

Director of Democracy Protection, researcher Dr. Hanah Stiverson frames online harassment of Black women in politics as a litmus test for democracy: 

“I see Black women in politics as being almost a litmus test on where we are in our state of our democracy… They are often… pushing back on the intersectional ways that oppressive strategies and policies impact the communities that they’re serving… and that is very often why they are a primary target of authoritarian actors.”

She argues that online violence — whether from anonymous users or public figures — is meant to intimidate and silence, not just individuals but entire communities:

https://www.nadiaebrownphd.com/“Online violence… is meant to either directly threaten targets using fear or humiliation to actively undermine our democratic processes.”

For Hanah, this calls for policy-level reform of digital systems, including:

• Laws like New York’s Stop Hiding Hate Act, which requires social media companies to report on moderation policies;
• Requirements for detailed disclosures about how platforms handle abuse;
• Higher expectations for disclosure of AI-generated content; and
• Policies that require fact checks and labels on mis- and disinformation targeting candidates. 

These reforms mirror the structural tools RepresentWomen promotes in electoral systems: transparency, accountability, and rules that do not leave vulnerable groups to fend for themselves.

2. Institutional Culture & Campaign Finance – Dr. Nadia E. Brown

Pictured: Dr. Nadia E. Brown, Professor of Government, director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and affiliate in the Black Studies department at Georgetown University. Dr. Brown is a founding board member of Women Also Know Stuff. Source: Website of Nadia E. Brown, PhD. 

Political scientist Dr. Nadia E. Brown focuses on legislatures as workplaces and how failing to treat them as such perpetuates harm.

“The legislature… is a workplace,” she emphasizes. “It’s a place where legislators, elected officials, go to work that should be regulated by workplace norms… They shouldn’t have a carve out for themselves.”

She calls for:

• Workplace protections in legislatures that recognize online and technology-facilitated harassment as real occupational harm;
• Clear rules and norms for how institutions respond to threats against members; and 
• Campaign finance reforms that allow funds to be used for security, childcare, and eldercare, especially for candidates who face higher levels of targeted abuse. 

“A simple thing to do is allow candidates to use campaign funds for security,” she notes. “The same way we should allow people to use campaign funds for childcare and eldercare.”

This sentiment was also shared by Kiah Morris, who expressed that from her vantage point, campaign finance is one of the most urgent reforms: 

“When I think about reforms, [...] I hate to say that money is the only way, because we don't have a political system that is publicly managed. [However], if it was publicly managed, we would have an insurance — a sort of assurance that individuals will have the communications teams that they need, and the communications team is not just helping them to hone in on what they need to say to the outside world, but they're also managing the messaging that's coming in. There needs to be cybersecurity.” — Kiah Morris 

Nadia also points to transparency as a catalyst for reform. When elected officials come forward with their own stories of how online harassment endangered their safety and shaped their decisions, those stories make system failures visible and harder for policymakers to dismiss:

“I think that if the politicians are more transparent about how they've handled issues, some of the conversations that they've had with their family, with loved ones, with the way that they protected themselves — whether it's through law enforcement or hiring private security or doing smaller things such as putting up cameras around the home — these are just some of the tactical things that people should know. You want folks to walk into politics with their eyes wide open as much as possible.”

Systems don’t change without visibility into the harm they produce. Stories of online harassment provide that clarity. When institutions take those stories seriously and allow them to inform policy and norm-setting, they become systems work, not an alternative to it. 

3. Psychology, Power, and Online Safety – Dr. Asia Eaton

Pictured: Dr. Asia Eaton, feminist social psychologist. Source: Florida International University

Feminist psychologist Dr. Asia Eaton highlights how gendered racism shapes both who is targeted and how institutions respond.

Her research shows that the public often minimizes harm to Black women experiencing image-based sexual abuse and deepfake attacks, blames them more, and blames perpetrators less. That bias affects whether Black women candidates are believed, protected, or dismissed as “overreacting.”

“There’s gendered racism not just in in-person beliefs about and responses to harms, but online harms as well,” she explains.

Asia argues that we need a comprehensive systems response that includes:

• A dedicated Office for Online Safety in the U.S., modeled on agencies like Australia’s eSafety and New Zealand’s NetSafe;
• Platform governance reforms, such as robust hash-matching tools, repeat-offender bans, and published median removal times for abusive content;
• Integration of technology-facilitated violence education into K–12 curricula, Title IX trainings, and public outreach; and
• Survivor-centered services, including helplines and peer support networks specifically prepared to support women facing online abuse. 

While these reforms would make a significant impact in mitigating harm for Black women, for Asia, designing better policies is only half the challenge. In her view, the deeper work requires shifting the cultural and institutional narratives that place responsibility on Black women rather than on the systems that fail them.

“It's true that marginalized communities have unique strengths and forms of resilience, but it's also true that that is the result of unnecessary hardship and is not inevitable,” Asia stated. “We cannot rely on the resilience of oppressed communities. We need to protect and support communities so that they are not subject to unequal burdens and harms.”

She emphasizes that meaningful change requires naming, clearly and repeatedly, that the problem is structural, not individual: 

“We have to describe how our systems are not currently fair and help people overcome the resistance behind that. [We have to] show them how [our systems] perpetuate inequity, and then show them a hopeful way forward — that there is possibility for us to develop coordinated policies and reforms that reduce harm… We also need to attribute harm to the right causes. Instead of attributing harm to the behavior of politicians who are harassed, it needs to be on the shoulders of the harasser. We have to reframe blame to be attributed to structural failures, platform design problems, and legal gaps.” 

A Systems Problem Demands Systems Solutions

What Kiah, Hanah, Nadia, and Asia make unmistakably clear is this: online violence against Black women in politics is not a glitch in the system — it is a product of the system. 

And a system built without women, especially Black women, in mind, will continue to expose them to harm, limit their participation, and diminish their political power.

RepresentWomen’s core belief has always been that rules shape outcomes. When the rules are broken — or incomplete — the outcomes will be inequitable, no matter who runs. The findings from this interview series reinforce that those rules now extend beyond ballots and chambers into the digital spaces where political life increasingly unfolds.

Indeed, online violence is not an interpersonal conflict, but rather a structural one, emerging from:

• Electoral rules that heighten polarization and zero-sum campaigning;
• Institutional norms that fail to recognize online harassment as workplace harm;
• Digital governance gaps that allow misogynoir to scale unchecked; and
• Resource inequities that force Black women to absorb costs others never face.

Just as our research has demonstrated that modernized electoral systems expand opportunities for women, our interviews with experts on digital harm show that digital safety must now be understood as part of the same ecosystem of reform. And in the same way we advocate for ranked choice voting, proportional representation, public financing, and legislative modernization, we must apply the same systems lens to:

• How campaigns resource safety;
• How legislatures respond to threats;
• How platforms govern abuse; and
• How communities mobilize to protect those who lead.

The bottom line is this: we cannot separate questions of representation from questions of safety. We cannot build a 21st-century democracy with 20th-century protections. And we cannot reach gender parity without confronting the disproportionate threats women, especially Black women, face.

Kiah’s experience, alongside the expertise of the scholars we interviewed, offers not only a warning but a blueprint. A blueprint for the structural changes required to ensure Black women can enter political life without navigating threats alone. Our task now is to build the systems — electoral, institutional, and digital — capable of bringing that blueprint to life.

When women can run without fear, serve without being targeted into silence, and lead without being treated as expendable, we will know that the architecture of our democracy has finally begun to change. Until then, their stories are not simply testimonies; they are mandates for better policies and road maps for the work ahead.

Our team thanks Marvelous Maeze for leading these interviews and contributing to our understanding of this topic.