One of the first pieces of advice you’ll get when faced with social media harassment is to not engage. Don’t give trolls your time and energy. Don’t try to dunk on vitriolic bots because fighting back seems natural. Better to mute offending accounts, log off until the storm blows over, and move on. But in Ivo van Aart’s revenge thriller “The Columnist,” our hero escalates the tension by showing up to her harassers’ residences and confronting them about their actions. Then, she fights verbal violence with physical violence.
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Femke Boot (Katja Herbers) is the type of feminist writer many trolls often target. Whether she writes about mundane things or political social issues, Boot is constantly under attack online, a situation that’s only getting worse. At first, she threatens to leave social media, but the hate keeps pouring in. She tries to report the harassment to the police, but no one takes her fears of online death threats and violence seriously. S