Monica Lewinsky says Time magazine should have awarded its “Person of the Year” to someone other than President-elect Trump — and she has a suggestion.
“If Time magazine had asked my opinion about their ‘Person of the Year’ (and they didn’t), I would have told them: the trolls,” Lewinsky wrote in an editorial published by Vanity Fair on Wednesday.
The former White House intern from Bill Clinton’s administration said it’s been “quite a year for the bullying gremlins.”
“Maybe it was even prophetic that the Warner Bros. film ‘Gremlins,’ about benevolent little creatures morphing into evil beings, and multiplying, was released in 1984. While the Internet is not quite Big Brother (yet!), it is a Habermasian public sphere and a powerful, if virtual, institution,” wrote Lewinsky, who is an advocate for anti-cyberbullying.
While trolls have lurked around the internet since its creation, Lewinsky said 2016 was the year “they sprouted and proliferated.”
Lewinsky applauded the trolling policies some social media outlets have employed in order to crack down on bullying, but implored readers to “consider engendering empathic responses and creating environments in social media that, from their initial designs, foster support, compassion, and community. Bake empathy into the cake rather than frosting it later.”
