• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, December 7, 2016

The high-profile feud between president-elect Donald Trump and Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly was a fixture of the 2016 presidential election, and social media played a major role in the conflict by enabling the Republican candidate’s campaign team to whip up anger against Kelly for her critical stance towards Trump. The result was a deluge of threats and hateful content towards Kelly and her family, the Fox News host recalled at an event this week.

Speaking to an audience at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., Kelly singled out Trump loyalist Dan Scavino, who served as the campaign’s director of social media, for blame, according to the Guardian: “The vast majority of Donald Trump supporters are not at all this way. It’s that far corner of the Internet that really enjoys nastiness and threats and unfortunately there is a man who works for Donald Trump whose job it is to stir these people up and that man needs to stop doing that. His name is Dan Scavino.”

In one incident from October, Scavino seemed to tweet an implied threat of retribution: “Megyn Kelly made a total fool out of herself tonight – attacking Donald Trump. Watch what happens to her after this election is over.”

As they surely intended, Scavino and Trump’s tweets about Kelly triggered a vast amount of vitriol from pro-Trump social media users, including countless anonymous trolls. She told the audience: “When Donald Trump comes after you, it isn’t just a tweet – ‘oh wow, he’s tweeting about her’, and I understand he’s a fighter, he’s a counter-puncher, I get all that – but even then he has such power that a single tweet can unleash hell in somebody’s life.

The personal consequences for Kelly were dramatic: “I’ve been under armed guard for 16 months and my children have been under armed guard and it’s not an appropriate price to pay for hard-hitting journalism.”