“’Online musings’ is a ridiculous euphemism for what are of-ten grossly violent and misogynistic threats,” Soraya Chem-aly, director of the Speech Project of the Women’s Media Center, which seeks to encourage free expression and curtail online abuse, told Cosmopolitan.com. “It sends the message to abusive partners, obsessive stalkers, or angry rejected boys that it’s just fine to post a little ditty in social media and claim they were joking. It sends the correlating message to women that their realistic assessments of risk and the costs of chang-ing their lives in response to threats is irrelevant. It solves nothing and, arguably, makes things worse.

Though many websites subsist in legal gray zones, some large sites have taken it upon themselves to self-censor user posts, according to Soraya Chemaly, the executive director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Projectand a women’s rights advocate. She pointed to changes Facebook has made, such as choosing to take down pages with names like “12 Year Old Slut Memes”—which featured photos of young girls with explicit and crude captions—as well as Reddit’s removal of its creepshot subreddit as prog-ress. (It’s worth nothing that a subreddit that claims to be a critique of fashion hosts content that is at least a little similar to the stuff on the old creepshot page.)