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Extremists Find a Financial Lifeline on Twitch

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Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman, a podcaster who fought to overturn the 2020 presidential election, recently railed against mask mandates to her 4,000 fans in a live broadcast and encouraged them to enter stores maskless. On another day, she grew emotional while thanking them for sending her $84,000.

Millie Weaver, a former correspondent for the conspiracy theory website Infowars, speculated on her channel that coronavirus vaccines could be used to surveil people. Later, she plugged her merchandise store, where she sells $30 “Drain the Swamp” T-shirts and hats promoting conspiracies.

And a podcaster who goes by Zak Paine or Redpill78, who pushes the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, urged his viewers to donate to the congressional campaign of an Ohio man who has said he attended the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on Jan. 6.

All three spread their messages on Twitch, a livestreaming video site owned by Amazon that has become a new mainstream base of operations for many far-right influencers. Streamers like them turned to the site after Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms clamped down on misinformation and hate speech ahead of the 2020 election.

Twitch comes with a bonus: The service makes it easy for streamers to make money, providing a financial lifeline just as their access to the largest online platforms has narrowed. The site is one of the avenues, along with apps like Google Podcasts, where far-right influencers have scattered as their options for spreading falsehoods have dwindled.

Twitch became a multibillion-dollar business thanks to video gamers broadcasting their play of games like Fortnite and Call of Duty. Fans, many of whom are young men, pay the gamers by subscribing to their channels or donating money. Streamers earn even more by sending their fans to outside sites to either buy merchandise or donate money.

Now Twitch has also become a place where right-wing personalities spread election and vaccine conspiracy theories, often without playing any video games. It is part of a shift at the platform, where streamers have branched out from games into fitness, cooking, fishing and other lifestyle topics in recent years.

But unlike fringe livestreaming sites like Dlive and Trovo, which have also offered far-right personalities moneymaking opportunities, Twitch attracts far larger audiences. On average, 30 million people visit the site each day, the platform said.

Twitch “monetizes the propaganda, which is unique,” said Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who tracks extremists online. She said it was as though listeners of the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, who died in February, were donating in real time and chipping in greater sums whenever Mr. Limbaugh shared more controversial ideas.

“You can turn the dial up and down and turn the flow of money up and down by saying certain things on your stream,” Ms. Squire said.

At least 20 channels associated with far-right movements have started broadcasting on Twitch since the fall, according to data compiled by Genevieve Oh, a livestreaming analyst. Some are associated with QAnon, the false theory that former President Donald J. Trump is fighting a cabal of Democratic pedophiles.

The channels range from intermittent broadcasters with several hundred views to ones that go live nearly every day and attract thousands of viewers.

In a statement, Sara Clemens, Twitch’s chief operating officer, said QAnon users were only a “small handful” of the seven million people who streamed on the site each month.

“We will take action against users that violate our community policies against harmful content that encourages or incites self-destructive behavior, harassment, or attempts or threatens to physically harm others, including through misinformation,” she said.

Twitch viewers support streamers through monthly subscriptions of $5, $10 or $25 to their channels, or by donating “bits,” a Twitch currency that can be converted to real money. The site also runs advertisements during streams. The platform and streamers split the revenue from ads and subscriptions.

It is difficult to determine how much money individual streamers earn from their Twitch channels, but some of the far-right personalities have made many thousands of dollars.

By viewing chat logs of streams that denote when a new user has subscribed, Ms. Oh has tallied at least $26,000 in subscriptions for Ms. Maras-Lindeman since December and about $5,000 in “bit” donations before Twitch took its cut.

Ms. Weaver has earned nearly $3,000 since she began streaming regularly on Twitch in March, according to Ms. Oh’s tally, and Mr. Paine has made at least $5,000. Those numbers do not account for money made in other ways, such as through Square’s Cash App or Ms. Weaver’s online merchandise store.

Twitch generally has stricter rules than other social media platforms for the kinds of views that users can express. It temporarily suspended Mr. Trump’s account for “hateful conduct” last summer, months before Facebook and Twitter made similar moves. Its community guidelines prohibit hateful conduct and harassment. Ms. Clemens said Twitch was developing a misinformation policy.

This month, Twitch announced a policy that would allow it to suspend the accounts of people who committed crimes or severe offenses in real life or on other social media platforms, including violent extremism or membership in a known hate group. Twitch said it did not consider QAnon to be a hate group.

Despite all this, a Twitch channel belonging to Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, a white nationalist organization, remained online until the middle of this month after The New York Times inquired about it. And the white nationalist Anthime Joseph Gionet, known as Baked Alaska, had a Twitch channel for months, even though he was arrested in January by the F.B.I. and accused of illegally storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Twitch initially said his activities had not violated the platform’s policies, then barred him this month for hateful conduct.

Ms. Maras-Lindeman and Mr. Paine are Twitch Partners, a coveted status that grants improved customer support and greater options to customize streams. Twitch vets these channels to approve what they do. The company’s website says partners should “act as role models to the community.”

Ms. Maras-Lindeman, who is barred from Twitter, averaged about 3,000 viewers a broadcast in March, and her live video broadcast quickly became one of the 1,200 most popular channels across all of Twitch. Her streams are often akin to extended monologues about current events.

Sometimes, the “O” in her “ToreSays” username is replaced with a fiery “Q,” and she uses the slogan “Where we go one, we go all,” both symbols of the QAnon movement. She has encouraged her viewers to find legal avenues to throw Ohio legislators out of office because, she said, they were elected using illegitimate voting machines.

“You want a great reset? Here it is. We’re going to do it our way, and that’s by eliminating you,” she said during one January stream.

Aside from money made on Twitch, Ms. Maras-Lindeman’s fans donated more than $84,000 for her birthday through a GoFundMe campaign. She said the donations went toward a new car, medical treatments and a lawyer.

In an email, Ms. Maras-Lindeman disputed the characterization of her as a member of the far right and said she did not advocate violence.

“It is not a crime to discuss science and challenge popular current narratives or express my thoughts and opinions,” she said.

On a recent stream, Ms. Maras-Lindeman addressed questions emailed to her for this article. She said she was a “centrist” who was simply encouraging her viewers to become more politically active.

Mr. Paine’s channel has more than 14,000 followers and is rife with conspiracy theories about vaccines and cancer. In one stream, he and a guest encouraged viewers to drink a bleach solution that claims to cure cancer, which the Food and Drug Administration has said is dangerous. Last week, he referred to a QAnon belief that people are killing children to “harvest” a chemical compound from them, then talked about a “criminal cabal” controlling the government, saying people do not understand “what plane of existence they come from.”

Mr. Paine, who is barred from Twitter and YouTube, has also asked his Twitch audience to donate to the House campaign of J.R. Majewski, an Air Force veteran in Toledo, Ohio, who attracted attention last year for painting his lawn to look like a Trump campaign banner. Mr. Majewski has used QAnon hashtags but distanced himself from the movement in an interview with his local newspaper, The Toledo Blade.

Mr. Majewski has appeared on Mr. Paine’s streams, where they vape, chat about Mr. Majewski’s campaign goals and take calls from listeners.

“He is exactly the type of person that we need to get in Washington, D.C., so that we can supplant these evil cabal criminal actors and actually run our own country,” Mr. Paine said on one stream.

Neither Mr. Paine nor Mr. Majewski responded to a request for comment.

Joan Donovan, a Harvard University researcher who studies disinformation and online extremism, said streamers who rely on their audience’s generosity to fund themselves felt pressured to continue raising the stakes.

“The incentive to lie, cheat, steal, hoax and scam is very high when the cash is easy to acquire,” she said.

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How Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s C.E.O. Became Foes

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“It really spoke to the power of Apple controlling the operating system,” said Brian Wieser, president of business intelligence at GroupM, an advertising industry firm. “Facebook isn’t in control of its own destiny.”

At Facebook, Apple’s privacy moves were viewed as hypocritical, said three current and former Facebook employees. Apple has long had a lucrative arrangement with Google to plug Google’s data-hungry search engine into Apple products, for instance. Facebook executives also noted that Apple was entrenched in China, where the government surveils its citizens.

Privately, Mr. Zuckerberg told his lieutenants that Facebook “needed to inflict pain” upon Apple and Mr. Cook, said a person with knowledge of the discussions. The Wall Street Journal previously reported Mr. Zuckerberg’s comment.

Behind the scenes, that work had already begun. In 2017, Facebook had expanded its work with Definers Public Affairs, a Washington firm that specialized in opposition research against its clients’ political foes. Definers employees distributed research about Apple’s compromises in China to reporters, and a website affiliated with Definers published articles criticizing Mr. Cook, according to documents and former Definers employees.

Definers also began an “astroturfing” campaign to draft Mr. Cook as a 2020 presidential candidate, presumably to put him in President Trump’s cross hairs, The New York Times reported in 2018. A website, “Draft Tim Cook 2020,” featured a lofty quote from the chief executive and a model campaign platform for him. Data behind the website linked it to Definers.

(Definers’ work against Apple was also funded by Qualcomm, another Apple rival, according to a Definers employee. Facebook fired Definers after The Times reported on its activity.)

Apple and Facebook have also started competing in other areas, including messaging, mobile gaming and “mixed-reality” headsets, which are essentially eyeglasses that mix digital images into a person’s view of the world.

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To Be Tracked or Not? Apple Is Now Giving Us the Choice.

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If we had a choice, would any of us want to be tracked online for the sake of seeing more relevant digital ads?

We are about to find out.

On Monday, Apple plans to release iOS 14.5, one of its most anticipated software updates for iPhones and iPads in years. It includes a new privacy tool, called App Tracking Transparency, which could give us more control over how our data is shared.

Here’s how it works: When an app wants to follow our activities to share information with third parties such as advertisers, a window will show up on our Apple device to ask for our permission to do so. If we say no, the app must stop monitoring and sharing our data.

A pop-up window may sound like a minor design tweak, but it has thrown the online advertising industry into upheaval. Most notably, Facebook has gone on the warpath. Last year, the social network created a website and took out full-page ads in newspapers denouncing Apple’s privacy feature as harmful to small businesses.

A big motivator, of course, was that the privacy setting could hurt Facebook’s own business. If we choose not to let Facebook track us, it will be harder for the company to see what we are shopping for or doing inside other apps, which will make it more difficult for brands to target us with ads.(Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has disputed that his company’s business will be hurt by Apple’s policy.)

“This is a huge step in the right direction, if only because it’s making Facebook sweat,” said Gennie Gebhart, a director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit.

But, she added, “One big question is, will it work?”

Ms. Gebhart and other privacy experts said Apple’s new feature might not be enough to put an end to shady tracking on iPhones. It could simply push developers and ad-technology firms to find loopholes so they can continue tracking people in different ways, she and others said.

For about two months, I have been testing early versions of iOS 14.5 to get acclimated with the new privacy control and other new features. Only a few developers have been testing the pop-up window with the public, so my findings about how well the privacy feature works have been limited.

But I found that iOS 14.5 also has other important new features. One is the ability to use Siri to work with a music player other than Apple Music, such as Spotify. That’s a big deal: In the past, you could only ask Siri to play songs through Apple Music, so the voice assistant wasn’t as useful for those who preferred other music services.

Here’s what you need to know about Apple’s new software.

It’s important to understand how tracking works inside apps.

Let’s say you use a shopping app to browse for a blender. You look at a blender from Brand X, then close the app. Later, ads for that blender start showing up in other mobile apps, like Facebook and Instagram.

Here’s what happened: The shopping app hired an ad-tech company that embedded trackers inside the app. Those trackers looked at information on your device to pinpoint you. When you opened other apps working with the same ad-tech firm, those apps were able to identify you and serve you ads for Brand X’s blender.

Apple’s new privacy feature is intended to let you decide whether you want that to happen. Now, when you open some apps, you will be greeted with a pop-up window: “Allow [App Name] to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites?” You can choose “Ask App Not to Track” or “Allow.”

When we select “Ask App Not to Track,” two things happen. The first is that Apple disables the app from using an Apple device identifier, a random string of letters and numbers assigned to our iPhones and that is used to track our activities across apps and websites. The second is that we communicate to the app developer that, broadly speaking, we don’t want our information to be tracked and shared with anyone in any way.

That seems easy enough. But No. 2 is where things also get slightly complicated.

Ad-tech companies already have many ways to follow us beyond Apple’s device identifier. For example, advertisers can use a method called fingerprinting. This involves looking at seemingly innocuous characteristics of your device — like the screen resolution, operating system version and model — and combining them to determine your identity and track you across different apps.

It’s difficult for Apple to block all tracking and fingerprinting happening on iPhones, privacy researchers said. That would require knowing about or predicting every new tracking method that an ad-tech firm comes up with.

“From a technical standpoint, there isn’t a whole lot that you can do” to stop such tracking, said Mike Audi, the founder of Tiki, an app that can help you see what other apps are doing with your data.

Yet the privacy change is still significant because it explicitly asks us for consent. If we tell apps that we don’t want to be tracked and they keep doing so, Apple can ban the offenders from its App Store.

The pop-up window also makes the privacy control far easier for people to discover, said Stephanie Nguyen, a research scientist who has studied user experience design and data privacy. In the past, iPhone owners could restrict advertisers from tracking them, but the tools to do so were buried in settings where most people wouldn’t look.

“The option was available before, but really, was it?” Ms. Nguyen said. “That’s a big shift — making it visible.”

As of this week, all apps with tracking behavior must include the App Tracking Transparency pop-up in their next software updates. That means we initially will probably see a small number of apps requesting permission to track us, with the number growing over time as more apps get updated.

Apple’s new software also includes two other interesting new features: the ability to use Siri to play audio with a third-party app like Spotify and the option to quickly unlock an iPhone while wearing a mask.

For many, these will feel long overdue. Siri has generally worked only with Apple Music for music playback since 2015, which has been annoying and inconvenient for those who want to use the voice assistant to play songs using other music apps. The change comes as antitrust scrutiny mounts over whether Apple stifles competition by favoring its own apps.

To make Siri work with other audio services, you won’t have to change any settings. If you normally listen to music with a third-party app, such as Spotify, Siri will simply learn over time that you prefer that app and react accordingly. (Audio app developers need to program their apps to support Siri, so if they haven’t done so yet, this won’t work.) That means if you always use Spotify to play music, you will be able to say “Hey Siri, play The Beatles” to start playing a Beatles playlist on Spotify.

The other new feature helps solve a pandemic issue. For more than a year, wearing a mask has been extra annoying for owners of newer iPhones that have face scanners to unlock the device. That’s because the iPhone camera has not been able to recognize our covered mugs. Apple’s iOS 14.5 finally delivers a mechanism to unlock the phone while masked, though it requires wearing an Apple Watch.

Here’s how that works: When you scan your face and the phone determines it can’t recognize you because your mouth and nose are obstructed, it will check to see if your Apple Watch is unlocked and nearby. The Apple Watch, in effect, acts as proof to verify that you are the one trying to unlock your phone.

To make this work, update the software on your iPhone and Apple Watch, then open the Settings app on your iPhone. Scroll down to “Face ID & Passcode.” In this menu, go to “Unlock with Apple Watch” and toggle on the option to use your Apple Watch to unlock when the image scanner detects your face with a mask.

Next time you are at the grocery store and look at your phone, your watch will vibrate once and unlock your phone. Sweet relief.

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Is an Activist’s Pricey House News? Facebook Alone Decides.

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The Post’s editorial board wrote that Facebook and other social media companies “claim to be ‘neutral’ and that they aren’t making editorial decisions in a cynical bid to stave off regulation or legal accountability that threatens their profits. But they do act as publishers — just very bad ones.”

Of course, it takes one to know one. The Post, always a mix of strong local news, great gossip and spun-up conservative politics, is making a bid for the title of worst newspaper in America right now. It has run a string of scary stories about Covid vaccines, the highlight of which was a headline linking vaccines to herpes, part of a broader attempt to extend its digital reach. Great stuff, if you’re mining for traffic in anti-vax Telegram groups. The piece on the Black Lives Matter activist that Facebook blocked was pretty weak, too. It insinuated, without evidence, that her wealth was ill-gotten, and mostly just sneered at how “the self-described Marxist last month purchased a $1.4 million home.”

But then, you’ve probably hate-read a story about a person you disliked buying an expensive house. When Lachlan Murdoch, the co-chairman of The Post’s parent company, bought the most expensive house in Los Angeles, for instance, it received wide and occasionally sneering coverage. Maybe Mr. Murdoch didn’t know he could get the stories deleted by Facebook.

Facebook doesn’t keep a central register of news articles it expunges on these grounds, though the service did block a Daily Mail article about the Black Lives Matter activist’s real estate as well. And it does not keep track of how many news articles it has blocked, though it regularly deletes offending posts by individuals, including photos of the home of the Fox News star Tucker Carlson, a Facebook employee said.

What Facebook’s clash with The Post really revealed — and what surprised me — is that the platform does not defer, at all, to news organizations on questions of news judgment. A decision by The Post, or The New York Times, that someone’s personal wealth is newsworthy carries no weight in the company’s opaque enforcement mechanisms. Nor, Facebook’s lawyer said, does a more nebulous and reasonable human judgment that the country has felt on edge for the last year and that a Black activist’s concern for her own safety was justified. (The activist didn’t respond to my inquiry but, in an Instagram post, called the reporting on her personal finances “doxxing” and a “tactic of terror.”)

The point of Facebook’s bureaucracy is to replace human judgment with a kind of strict corporate law. “The policy in this case prioritizes safety and privacy, and this enforcement shows how difficult these trade-offs can be,” the company’s vice president for communications, Tucker Bounds, said. “To help us understand if our policies are in the right place, we are referring the policy to the Oversight Board.”

The board is a promising kind of supercourt that has yet to set much meaningful policy. So this rule could eventually change. (Get your stories deleted while you can!)

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English Soccer Announces Social Media Boycott to Protest Online Abuse

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English soccer officials said Saturday that they would conduct a social media blackout next weekend to protest “the ongoing and sustained discriminatory abuse received online by players and many others connected to football.”

The boycott has the support of a coalition of groups, including the Premier League, the richest and most high profile soccer league in the world, but also England’s soccer federation; the top two professional tiers of men’s and women’s soccer; referees; the country’s players union, and others.

The action is the most direct effort yet by a sport to pressure social media companies like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to take action against online abuse, and comes after a season in which players, clubs, team executives, referees, female commentators and others have been the targets of abuse.

The social media boycott also follows a week of fury and street protests against top clubs and their owners who tried — and failed — to create a breakaway European Super League that would have walled them off from many of the structures, including the pay system, that have sustained soccer for a century. At each of the protests, there were vitriolic demands for the owners of teams to sell.

Cases of harassment have been well documented online. In February, Arsenal striker Eddie Nketiah posted a picture on Twitter with the caption “Working with a smile!”

The tweet was met with racist abuse from a Twitter user who told Nketiah, who is Black, to leave the club. Twitter responded by permanently suspending the user’s account, Sky Sports reported.

Such harassment has been instigated not only by fans, but also by club social media accounts. In December, the commentator and former soccer player Karen Carney deleted her Twitter account after she received a wave of online abuse.

After a 5-0 win by Leeds United over West Brom, Carney on Amazon Prime Video Sport wondered whether Leeds would “blow up at the end of the season.” A clip of her commentary was shared by the Leeds team Twitter account, which invited a slew of hateful messages toward Carney.

Many on Twitter defended her and criticized the team’s social media folks, including the former Leeds captain Rio Ferdinand, who called for the tweet to be deleted.

Bethany England, a forward for Chelsea, called out Leeds’ social media team for “atrocious behaviour.”

“Cyber bullying a female pundit and opening her up to mass online abuse for DOING HER JOB AND HAVING HER OPINION!” England said.

In February, the top executives of the Football Association — English soccer’s governing body — the Premier League, and other organizations wrote an open letter to Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, and Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Facebook, calling for the leaders to put an end to “the levels of vicious, offensive abuse” coming from users on their platforms.

“The reality is your platforms remain havens for abuse,” the soccer executives wrote. “Your inaction has created the belief in the minds of the anonymous perpetrators that they are beyond reach.”

In the past, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter have taken steps, such as banning users temporarily or permanently, but the issues of online abuse have persisted.

In a news release announcing the social media boycott, which will take place from Friday afternoon through Monday, English soccer called on the United Kingdom to “bring in strong legislation to make social media companies more accountable for what happens on their platforms.”

In the statement, Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executive, said the league would continue to push social media companies to make changes to prevent online abuse.

“Racist behaviour of any form is unacceptable and the appalling abuse we are seeing players receive on social media platforms cannot be allowed to continue,” Masters said. “Football is a diverse sport, which brings together communities and cultures from all backgrounds and this diversity makes the competition stronger.”

It’s not the first time soccer has tried to shine a light on racism.

Players and coaches in the Premier League and other top leagues, for example, have been kneeling before kickoffs all season in a show of support for the Black Lives Matter movement — at the encouragement of the league’s team captains and with the support of league officials.

But some players and even entire teams, frustrated with a lack of concrete progress on racial issues and feeling the gesture has become more performative than productive, have recently stopped taking part.

Crystal Palace forward Wilfried Zaha said he had come to see the kneeling as “degrading,” and said he would stop doing it and would focus his efforts elsewhere. Brentford, a team in England’s second-tier Championship, in February stopped taking a knee before games. While the players said in a statement that they still supported antiracism efforts, they said, “We believe we can use our time and energies to promote racial equality in other ways.”

The social-media blackout will take place while an entire slate of games in multiple leagues will be played, including one between Manchester United and Liverpool, the Premier League’s defending champion.

Edleen John, director of international relations for the Football Association, said English soccer will not stop pressing for change after next weekend.

“It’s simply unacceptable that people across English football and society more broadly continue to be subjected to discriminatory abuse online on a daily basis, with no real-world consequences for perpetrators,” John said. “Social media companies need to be held accountable if they continue to fall short of their moral and social responsibilities to address this endemic problem.”

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Women Are Battling China’s Angry Trolls. The Trolls Are Winning.

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The feminists’ social media accounts had been slowly disappearing in China for days. And when that wasn’t enough for their angry critics, a powerful voice on the internet stepped in to help.

In a discussion on the popular Chinese platform Weibo, one of the critics asked for better guidelines on how to file complaints against women who shared feminist views. The user suggested that the company add “inciting mass confrontation” to the list of violations that could have them removed. A Weibo account long affiliated with the company’s chief executive, Wang Gaofei, joined the conversation to offer tips.

“Here,” the person using the account said on April 14, posting a screenshot with easy instructions for filing complaints against the women. Under “type of complaint,” click “inciting hatred,” the screenshot showed. Under specific reason: “gender discrimination.”

Women who express feminist views on social media have long been subjected to torrents of hateful comments. In China, not only do those views attract the attention of trolls, they can also lead to getting kicked off the platforms by furious users empowered by unlikely allies: the internet companies themselves.

Several prominent Chinese feminists have had their accounts deleted from Weibo in the last two weeks following public complaints. According to the women, at least 15 accounts have been removed. The women say it is part of a growing online campaign to stamp out feminist voices in a country where the government controls the internet and social movements are swiftly cut down. Two of the women have filed lawsuits against Weibo.

“I was speechless,” Liang Xiaowen, an outspoken Chinese feminist, said of the screenshot. While Mr. Wang’s name is not officially attached to the account, he has been identified as its owner in half a dozen state media reports and a podcast. “He accused me of gender discrimination, which is the most laughable thing in the world,” she said.

Ms. Liang, a 28-year-old lawyer in New York, is one of the women whose accounts were removed by Weibo. She is suing the company for violating China’s civil code, saying it did not adequately explain its accusations against her.

The women’s accounts first started disappearing after March 31. Two days earlier, Xiao Meili, a well-known feminist in China, had left a hot pot restaurant in the southwestern city of Chengdu, angry that a man had ignored her repeated requests to stop smoking illegally indoors. The man was so furious that he hurled a cup of hot liquid at Ms. Xiao and her friends.

Ms. Xiao, 30, later uploaded a video about the incident, prompting a groundswell of support that soon unleashed a noxious backlash.

That afternoon, she was besieged by thousands of hateful messages. Users dug up a 2014 photograph of Ms. Xiao holding a poster that said “Pray for Hong Kong” and used it to accuse her of supporting Hong Kong independence. Hours after the photo surfaced, Ms. Xiao discovered her Weibo account had been frozen.

In a statement on April 13, Weibo said that four of the deleted accounts had posted “illegal and harmful” content, and it called on users to respect Weibo’s basic principles, which include “not inciting group confrontation and inciting a culture of boycott.” In addition to Weibo, Ms. Xiao has had her account removed by one other Chinese internet company. None of the companies responded to requests for comment.

“This has caused a lot of damage to my spirit,” Ms. Xiao said in an interview. “Since March 31, I have been very nervous, angry and depressed.”

Feminists in China say Weibo has applied a double standard when it comes to policing abuse against men and women. Weibo blocks the use of phrases such as “national male,” a derogatory term for Chinese men. But rape threats and words like “bitch” are permissible. Zheng Churan, a feminist whose account was also removed recently, said several of her female friends had tried to report offensive remarks to Weibo but had never succeeded.

“It’s really obvious where the platforms are aligned on such matters,” Ms. Zheng said.

China’s ruling Communist Party has long been wary of social activism that could challenge its rule and provoke instability. In 2015, the Chinese authorities detained Ms. Zheng and four other feminists on a charge of “picking quarrels and provoking troubles” ahead of a campaign about sexual harassment on public transportation. The detentions led to an international outcry.

Feminist ideas have slowly entered the mainstream. Many women have been encouraged by the small gains in the country’s nascent #MeToo movement. And feminist thought appeals to Chinese women who feel that the government fails to address issues of gender discrimination, said Lu Pin, a veteran women’s rights activist based in New York whose account was also removed.

There are few outlets for women to vent in China. “That’s why they go online,” Ms. Lu said.

Weibo has played a central role in helping women find like-minded communities on the internet. It was on Weibo that women shared their thoughts on domestic violence, the difficulties of getting a divorce and gender discrimination in the workplace. Gender-related issues are often among the most talked-about subjects on the platform. But in a male-dominated culture, that has led to resentment.

Many of the most active opponents of China’s rising online feminist discourse have hundreds of thousands of followers. Some are celebrated in state media and allied with a broader nationalist movement that sees any form of criticism as an affront to Beijing. Women are easy targets, facing death threats and accusations of being “separatists.”

Douban, an internet forum and review website, has also recently removed at least eight groups dedicated to women’s issues, according to China Digital Times, a website that tracks Chinese internet controls. Douban declined to comment.

After the hot pot incident, Taobao, an e-commerce site in China, removed 23 items from Ms. Xiao’s online store, saying that they were “prohibited content,” according to a notice viewed by The New York Times. All of the items had the word “feminist” written on them. Ms. Xiao sued Weibo in a Beijing court on April 14, seeking access to her account and $1,500 in compensation.

After she posted her lawsuit on WeChat, China’s ubiquitous instant messaging platform, her public account was removed for “violating regulations.”

Ms. Liang, the lawyer, said she was one of the many women inundated by abuse after she posted supportive messages for Ms. Xiao. She was furious when her Weibo account was frozen, because it meant she could no longer defend herself, she said. “It’s the equivalent of sealing your mouth shut, hanging you up and leaving you to burn,” she said.

One of Ms. Liang’s supposed offenses was sharing a post on Twitter by the group “Chinese for Uyghurs.” Her critics used it to accuse her of being unpatriotic by spreading awareness of the plight of the oppressed Muslim minority.

Despite the risks, many women continue to share messages of support for those who have been kicked off Weibo, Ms. Liang said. She described the platform as “the only open space for me to speak out” and said she wanted her account back, even though she knew that the same angry users would be waiting for her when she returned.

“I think having this space is especially important for young women on the internet,” she said. “I refuse to give it up to those disgusting people.”

Elsie Chen contributed reporting. Lin Qiqing contributed research.

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MacKenzie Scott Gave Away Billions. The Scam Artists Followed.

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Even people with Ms. Scott’s resources can’t prevent swindlers from using their names. Scammers have copied the webpage of the federal Small Business Administration and impersonated the Federal Trade Commission, one of the agencies trying to combat exactly these sorts of cons.

Ms. Scott gives to institutions — universities, food banks, other frontline charities — not individuals. She has no accounts on social media like Facebook and Instagram, only her Medium page and a verified Twitter account with just three tweets. Her organization would never request fees upfront from grant recipients, a person with knowledge of her giving said. The person declined to comment directly on online deception taking place in Ms. Scott’s name or what actions she might take to help prevent it.

Ms. Churchill did more research and realized it was highly unlikely that Ms. Scott had been in touch with her directly, but still she could not cut herself off from the scammers right away. She had invested everything she could pull together in unlocking those promised funds.

“My son needs it for a better life. And I have already lost so much,” she said at the time.

Ms. Churchill shared dozens of screenshots and web pages, unveiling a complex network invented to prey on the hopes of the needy. She said the scammers had known that she had no money, that she was borrowing from her grandmother and her sister to cover the mushrooming fees.

After a few weeks, Ms. Churchill went to the local police. They told her that she had been conned and that there was no way to get her money back.

“This experience has ruined my life, to be honest,” she said.

She had already been struggling. Raising five children largely on her own, she relies on government support. Her mother is nearby in Sydney, but she is on dialysis and not able to help much. After Lachlan, her third born, received a diagnosis of autism, doctors said he needed specialized schooling and interventions she could not afford. Her GoFundMe page raised less than $500.

At the time the message from the “MacKenzie Scott Foundation” appeared in her inbox Ms. Churchill seemed to be in the kind of emotional distress that makes people more vulnerable to scammers, said Stacey Wood, professor of psychology at Scripps College.

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Social Media Etiquette Review

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Additionally, remember that any message you share, even with close family members, will be amplified to your entire online community. (The tension may also be amplified around vaccines, health measures and the stress of a not-normal year.) If you are replying to your sister online about something, that doesn’t mean you can speak to her as harshly as you might privately. Ms. Gottsman advises taking a heated family debate offline.

“Don’t start a family feud on social media,” Ms. Gottsman said. “It can affect the next family holiday.”

If you are soliciting donations for a particular cause or charity, or asking for money to pay someone’s rent or medical bills with a GoFundMe campaign, recognize that the financial situations of many people have changed this past year and there may be many other appeals compared to times past. Skip shaming phrases, like “How can you not help this person?” Instead, Ms. Gottsman said, use ones like “If your heart moves you, I’m sharing this.”

Think less vigilance is needed, because your text group is small or your settings have been changed to private? Think again. When Heidi Cruz, the wife of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, shared her family’s plans to flee a devastating winter storm in Texas for a vacation in Mexico, she texted only a small group of neighbors and friends. Screenshots of the messages ended up with journalists. Elaine Swann, an etiquette expert and founder of the School of Protocol in Carlsbad, Calif., points out that it wasn’t just one person who shared the chat with The New York Times; there were others who confirmed it.

“Even if you think it’s just your inner circle, there’s always somebody there who isn’t 100 percent on your team,” she said. “That’s the person who takes the screenshot before you delete whatever it is.”

Posting about food and fitness may be even more tempting than usual, given that a lot of people have changed what they eat and how much they exercise during the pandemic. But confine your commentary to how these lifestyle changes make you feel, not how they make you look. Among other things, not all people have had the luxury of more time to exercise during the pandemic — or if they did, they might not have had the energy to do so.

Dr. Lindsay Kite is a founder of Beauty Redefined, a nonprofit that promotes body image resilience, and an author of “More Than a Body.” She noted that your “before” photo — talking about how fat you look — may be someone else’s “after.”

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Here’s What Readers Told Us About Feeling Burned Out

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At this point in the pandemic, it feels that we have, all, collectively, hit a wall. Last week, The New York Times asked readers to tell us about work burnout they’re experiencing — nearly 700 people responded in two days. The responses were funny, vulnerable and indicative of a universal sense of: “We’ve had enough.” The collective picture they painted was of a work force struggling to do tasks that were once easy, people who know they are lucky to have a job but dream of quitting, and who would do anything to never have a Zoom meeting again.

Here’s what else we heard from readers. Responses have been lightly edited for clarity, and some people preferred to give only their first names.

“Waking up and realizing, ‘I am going to stare at my laptop for 8 hours, maybe 9, maybe 10, log off, feel utterly unaccomplished because I have not left my small office/bedroom/yoga studio for the entire day, and do it all again for who knows how long.’ At this point I don’t know who is going to crack first, me or the pandemic.”

— Stephanie Soderlund, chemist, Portland, Ore.

“Logging off at the end of the day. It’s nearly impossible. Once the world went into lockdown a year ago, I felt like I logged onto work and I’m still waiting to log off.”

— Natalie Fiacco, art director, New York

“All of it. I can’t focus at all. Every day is Groundhog Day. I get up, I drink tea, I spend 8-12 hours in front of the computer, I listen to podcasts all day while I work, I spend too much time on social media, and then I go to bed. We’ve barely left the flat in over a year now. I’m lucky to have a job, but I fantasize about quitting all the time.”

— Lee Anne Sittler, translator, Madrid

“The Microsoft Teams ringtone strikes fear in my heart and the Slack buzz dread in my spirit.”

— Carolyn, graphic designer, Brooklyn

“I’m juggling child care, teaching a kindergartner and also being timed for each activity at work. In social services, it takes a lot of emotional labor in normal times, now we have had nearly 300 percent increase in folks seeking our assistance”

— Risa, public benefits eligibility specialist, Tacoma, Wash.

“How do I log the hours I spent crying or staring out my window? (Spoiler: I can’t, because those things aren’t monetizable.)”

— Julie Bourne, content strategist, Brooklyn

“I’ve come to rely very much on the story of the Exodus during the past year, the story of ancient Israel’s time in the wilderness as both a time of trial, but also a time of preparation for what comes next.”

— Todd Vetter, pastor, Madison, Conn.

“I have been playing D&D every week through Discord with a group of friends. It has served as the closest thing to a routine that I have now, and a moment of respite to actually feel connected to other human beings.”

— Silas Choudhury, student, Jersey City, N.J.

“I dream about vacations to which I cannot drive.”

— Alexandra Robinson, art professor, Austin, Texas

“Getting outside in the morning makes the most difference on preventing motivational flatlining, but unless I have an accountability buddy it’s easy to skip. I skip more now than I was a year ago.”

— Prajna Cole, project manager, Eugene, Ore.

“I try to remember that pandemics don’t last forever.”

— Jason, high school teacher, Virginia

“I focus on my family, on keeping them happy and healthy. I also eat jelly beans.”

— Dr. Yemina Warshaver, emergency medicine physician, New York

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We Have All Hit a Wall

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“I feel fried,” said Erin H., a social media and event coordinator at a Midwestern university, whose work once inspired and excited her but currently seems like an unpleasant cocktail of boredom, dread and exhaustion. (She asked that her last name not be used so as not to upset her employers.) Things take longer to get done, she said, in part because she doesn’t want to do them.

“I’m out of ideas and have zero motivation to even get to a point where I feel inspired,” she wrote, responding to a request by The New York Times for people to describe their work- related challenges in Month 13 of the pandemic. “Every time my inbox dings, I feel a pang of dread.”

None of that is surprising, said Margaret Wehrenberg, an expert on anxiety and the author of the book “Pandemic Anxiety: Fear, Stress, and Loss in Traumatic Times.” A year of uncertainty, of being whipsawed between anxiety and depression, of seeing expert predictions wither away and goal posts shift, has left many people feeling that they are existing in a kind of fog, the world shaded in gray.

“When people are under a long period of chronic, unpredictable stress, they develop behavioral anhedonia,” Dr. Wehrenberg said, meaning the loss of the ability to take pleasure in their activities. “And so they get lethargic, and they show a lack of interest — and obviously that plays a huge role in productivity.”

Nearly 700 people responded to The Times’s questions, and the picture they painted was of a work force at its collective wits’ end. We heard from a clergyperson, a pastry chef, an I.C.U. nurse, a probation officer, a fast-food worker. Budget analysts, librarians, principals, college students holed up in childhood bedrooms, project managers, interns, real estate agents — their mood was strikingly similar, though their circumstances were different. As one respondent said, no matter how many lists she makes, “I find myself falling back into deep pajamaville.”

“I don’t think there’s anyone in the world who cannot say that the last year hasn’t been the hardest they’ve ever had,” Elizabeth Abend, 41, said in an interview. As head of human resources at a small chain of boutique fitness studios, Ms. Abend, who lives in Manhattan, has faced a cascade of challenges: having to tell casual employees there was no work; navigating uncertainty over when, and how, to reopen; pivoting to new digital services. And there has been loneliness, the death of her beloved dog, her own severe bout with Covid-19 last spring and the need, she said, “to be an adult human and pay bills and eat meals and all of that amid the exhaustion of having our entire world turned on its head.”

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