Tina Fey Has Strong Words About Online Hate Speech

In an interview with David Letterman published in The Hollywood Reporter, Tina Fey candidly expressed her feelings about the state of the country. When asked if her daughters had more knowledge of women's rights than they would have a generation ago, she admitted she was unsure. "It feels like we were on the precipice of things getting pretty good, and now we’re in a bit of a throwback moment. I definitely came out of last month feeling misogyny is much more real than two years ago," she said. She believes sexism and other related problems are even worse online. "The thing I worry about [more] than actual human interaction is the internet," she said. "Because that's just despicable: people just being able to be awful to each other without having to be in the same room." And when she refers to "last month," she's clearly talking about the election. "It's metastasizing now, thanks to our glorious president-elect who can't muster the dignity of a seventh-grader," she elaborated. "It's so easy for people to abuse each other and to abandon all civility." She's right to point out that hate has been propagating online. A recent Guardian report revealed that the majority of the results on Google's first page for searches like "are Muslims bad?" and "are women evil?" depict marginalized groups negatively. But discrimination has been on the rise in real life, too. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported hundreds of cases of harassment against racial minorities, LGBT people, and other common targets during the week following the election. "Trump has spent 18 months firing up his followers, essentially attacking all kinds of different minority groups," the SPLC's Mark Potok told Refinery29, "and those followers feel that they’ve won and they can say anything they want."