Ashley Judd Says Twitter Is "Inadequate" at Dealing With Online Abuse But Won't Delete Account—Find Out Why

The 47-year-old insurgent actress was mocked heavily during March Madness, when she was often shown on TV cheering on her favorite team, the Kentucky Wildcats

By Corinne Heller Apr 24, 2015 3:25 PMTags
Ashley JuddStreeter Lecka/Getty Images

Ashley Judd suffered a lot of abuse on Twitter this spring but the Insurgent actress, who says she was dehumanized as a result, is not letting the haters stop her from tweeting.

During March Madness, the 47-year-old Insurgent actress often expressed her support for her favorite team, the Kentucky Wildcats and was often shown on TV cheering them on during the 2015 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament.

Judd was mocked heavily online by many viewers and was even turned into memes. She also posted a spirited tweet slamming the Arkansas Razorbacks, which spurred nasty responses from several of the team's fans.

And some people took their criticism of the actress, posting extremely explicit, vulgar insults. Judd, who revealed in an op-ed essay that she is a rape survivor, said last month that she received threats of sexual abuse. She NBC News she planned on "pressing charges."

Judd addressed the issue of online abuse again while speaking at a panel called "Stop the Trolls" at the 2015 Women in the World Summit in New York on Thursday.

"When I was sitting there trying to report to Twitter, it's like, the method they gave me was so inadequate and so underrepresented the experience I was having, and demoralizing every time I got an automated response from Twitter and by the way, I would like to put pressure on them right now—I'm totally aggravated that they haven't reached out to me. I am low-hanging fruit."

Twitter has not responded to Judd's remarks. The social network had said in a statement last month, in response to her complaints about online harassment at the time, "We now review five times as many user reports as we did previously and we have tripled the size of the support team focused on handling abuse reports."

Judd also said she called the police after receiving the threats. She did not comment about other social networks' handling of the abusive messages directed towards her.

Despite all the harassment, Judd does not plan on quitting Twitter, where she has more than 266,000 followers.

"I want to stay on Twitter because I want to be connected and approachable and real," she said at the Women in the World Summit.

"I am a human being and so are the people who commit the abuse, and the underlying problem is the dehumanization of me and I don't want to commit that same fault by otherizing them and demonizing them," she said.

Judd added that at one point, she "had like 67 hate speech posts on my public Facebook alone and the majority of them were pornographic."

"By the way, this doesn't happen to Jack Nicholson," she said.

The 78-year-old actor does not have public social media accounts.

During March Madness, Judd had also responded to her critics online.