Lilly’s account has been spammed by pornography and hateful messages criticizing the way she speaks and conspiracy theories that her activism is part of a money-making scheme, Platt said.
“The first lot used to really upset me. It was like a physical kick in the stomach because I love my daughter and I can’t believe anyone would hate her like this,” she said.
Several members of the family have been targeted. Platt herself has been accused of child abuse for forcing Lilly into activism. The family once had all their computers and phones linked to the account hacked.
Tweets directed at Lilly’s grandfather — who ran a campaign encouraging seniors to vote in the European election on behalf of their grandchildren — suggested he should be killed with a dose of morphine, Platt said.
The sexism ingrained in these attacks is not unique to those directed at climate activists, experts say. A pervasive culture of mockery and abuse is present across online cultures, often manifested in attacks on women and girls.
Thunberg has become a “fun target” for the far-right online, according to Alex Kobray, director of physical security and counterterrorism for Flashpoint Intelligence, a global security firm and an NBC News partner.
“Anyone who doesn’t fit into their narrow view of the world is fair game for them,” Kobray said. “They view her as liberal, left-leaning, which to them is obviously inherently negative.
“It becomes a pile-on where once these people start on something, they all try to one-up and try to be the most hateful one in the room,” she said.
Apart from satisfying their own “twisted humor” there isn’t a specific audience the group appears to be attempting to sway with their manipulated images of Thunberg and ill-meaning humor.
Instead, this behavior helps to solidify the beliefs of climate skeptics and extreme right-wing critics and build camaraderie, Bernhard Forchtner, a media and communications professor at England’s University of Leicester, said.
“It’s an identity issue. It helps them reproduce their wider hostility or rejection of what they perceive to be a liberal, more cosmopolitan, mainstream view,” he said. “Through Greta, they can reject what they see as liberal hysteria.”
Many have come to Thunberg’s defence. Australian satirists Mark Humpries and Evan Williams made a mockery at the attackers, launching a video advertising an imagined “Greta Thunberg helpline for adults angry at a child” that went viral, being shared over 115,000 times on Twitter.
Still, in a Facebook post, Thunberg mused shutting down her account because of the extent of the hate speech on the platform. It’s a route some activists have been forced to take.
Ariadne Papatheodorou, a Fridays for Future organizer in Athens, Greece, said she keeps most of her social media accounts private to avoid attacks.
“Through life, people will hate on you and you have to overcome that,” she said. “Our movement is trying to save our world from destruction, so we can’t focus on these people who are literally screaming out hate.”
As an extra precaution, the Greek teens who organize weekly demonstrations avoid releasing any information about what schools they attend or where they live and don’t always provide their full name to the media, she said.
Other teens told NBC News they periodically switch their accounts to private settings around the time of major protests, when the backlash is most extreme.
For Platt, it means spending hours every day cleaning up Lilly’s social media accounts before allowing her access. She also answers other parents’ questions about how to protect their children online.
Despite the effort feeling like another job, Platt said she wouldn’t consider shutting it down.
“We couldn’t be more proud of her,” Platt said, listing off Lilly’s busy schedule of media interviews and invitations to environmental events and conferences along with her weekly climate strikes. “People can tell us ‘get that child back to school,’ but really this education from what she is doing is just immense. I will always champion this.”
