“Fake news,” “Go back to your country,” and “I’ll rape and shotgun you, Afghan style” are just some of the many threats women journalists in Canada have received as of late; forming an alarming trend that threatens to destroy free speech. One after another, vile messages continue to flood inboxes; laced with racialized slurs, threatening rape and a long list of other inexcusable things. In an open letter to federal ministers in the department of justice, Canadian journalists are now calling for concerted action to protect journalists and the right to speech. There is a looming fear that online threats may turn into physical violence, especially since most of the hate mail is directed towards ethnic minorities and immigrant communities who do not have the social capital to resist these threats. In 2018, five employees of the Capital Gazette in Maryland were brutally murdered in a mass shooting at a newspaper office. It was later revealed that the perpetrator had been stalking journalists for months before the incident. Law enforcement, however, has a tendency to downplay the perils of online bullying and rarely ever investigates such cases but it might be time to change that. Even politicians aren’t immune to the vitriol of anonymous individuals online who say all sorts of alarming things cocooned in the safety of encrypted IPS. Former Environment Minister Catherine McKenna has also received thousands of sexist messages since assuming office. In 2019, things took a sharp turn for the worse when someone spray painted the C word on the window of her campaign office. Police investigated the incident as a case of gender-based hate but no one was arrested. Hostility towards journalists is much worse than this-they are not granted the special protections and liberties that officeholders are. Anti-hate experts are urging policymakers to take action against what they believe is a growing tendency towards right-wing extremism. The problem is just as bad if not worse, at home, in Pakistan-women journalists are facing increasing levels of online harassment and intimidation. The digital media landscape is quickly shifting in Pakistan, enabling a new wave of systematic cyber-violence. Asma Shirazi, a well-known broadcast journalist, has been confronted with many threats of this nature in recent times and believes that online threats are a psychological weapon employed to threaten journalists into submission, all while remaining anonymous. People have broken into Shirazi’s house in the past but she continues to ask all the right questions. Many female journalists, however, have simply deleted their social media accounts over fears of retaliation. Pakistan is already one of the deadliest countries to practice journalism but even more so for women. The state has been taking their resilience for granted and must develop a better system for tracking online activity to ensure that perpetrators are punished. *