BRAIN STELTER (HOST): Do you think there is something specific about the way that these Trump trolls or Trump bots react to negative -- or even just skeptical coverage of the candidate? Is something unique about Trump here?
JULIA IOFFE: Well, look, a lot of the trolls who were sending me the most obscene, anti-Semitic stuff I have frankly ever seen directed at me in my life -- a lot of them had somebody in the user pic wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, or they had Trump as their background, or they had Trump as the, you know, user pic with like a KKK rally in the background. So you know, they were putting Trump right in the middle of all of this imagery.
STELTER: Do you think the campaign needs to do more to combat this? Because I think it's important to say you're not the first writer to face this kind of online harassment.
IOFFE: Yes, and not the last one.
STELTER: I've counted more than a dozen cases I did research on myself, including conservative commentators and reporters. I think your case has been perhaps a bigger story this week because you wrote about it, you've been public about it, you’ve shared some of this disgusting material on your own Twitter account. So you've made sure to highlight it to make sure people know what happened.
IOFFE: That's right. I know that I'm not the first person that this has happened to, or the last one that this will happen to. And I think it's important that people see what happens, you know, that this isn't just Trump telling his supporters to boo at the press section at his rallies.
STELTER: Although that happens too.
IOFFE: That happens too, but it's all part of this general disdain for the media is starting to cross certain thresholds, and it’s a little scary.
