How a woman took on a Twitter harasser who threatened her with rape — and won

By Julie Bort

When start-up founder and robotics wiz Xyla Foxlin started gaining national attention, she became the target of a Twitter harasser. Foxlin tried to get Twitter to shut down the harassment, which involved rape threats. When the threats escalated, Foxlin found a way to hunt down the harasser and put an end to it for good. 20-year-old Xyla Foxlin is quickly becoming a name in the world of robotics. Still in college, she’s already running a start-up called Parahug, which makes a plush toy that lets you send a hug over the internet that your child can actually feel.

Parahug had a successful Kickstarter campaign over the summer where it raised US$53,415 from 389 backers. This will help Foxlin deliver the toys, hopefully in time for the 2017 holidays. It’s also helped the young Foxlin score an increasing number of speaking gigs, a few robotics awards, and the chance to star in a Microsoft commercial.

But that increased visibility also came with a terrifying dark side: a Twitter stalker.

See no evil

A few months ago, she started getting nasty tweets from a particular user. “It started out with sexual harassment, like ‘you’re sleeping your way to the top,’ and this went on for weeks of very sexually explicit tweets. And then it turned into rape threats,” she told Business Insider.