Welcome To Gist Hacker: One woman is using Instagram to document a decade of online harassment

Mia Matsumiya knows all too well the perils of being a woman with a steady following on the Internet — while having a social media presence is a way to connect with people over shared interests, it also allows for online harassment.

Unfortunately, Matsumiya has been on the receiving end of outrageously creepy sexual messages for the past decade, and now she's fighting back with a new Instagram account exposing all the messages she's saved over the years.

Matsumiya, a professional violinist, first gained an online following after she started a blog documenting her band performances in 2003, and since then has amassed thousands of sexist and racist messages from anonymous online predators on MySpace, Facebook and OkCupid, among others.

“My blog ended up with a small following and with it, a bunch of unwanted and frightening attention," she told BuzzFeed.

The unwanted attention persisted when she began promoting her band on MySpace. Matsumiya told BuzzFeed that when she went to police, they only told her to "just turn off" her computer.

“Being 4’9", Asian American and a musical performer has sort of been a nightmare combination when it comes to harassment,” she told The Huffington Post. “It seems to attract an insane amount of unacceptable, predatory behavior.”

It's only appropriate, then, that the account she uses to post the creepy messages is called@perv_magnet.

For the past decade, Matsumiya has collected the messages in a folder she labeled "creepiness."

“I received an insane number of creepy messages the whole time I was in that band,” she toldBuzzFeed. “I thought for sure that the messages were going to stop at some point, but they’ve persisted to this day.”

Matsumiya became particularly disturbed when she discovered that a man who sent her unrelenting messages had been arrested for stalking another Asian woman.

“When the police arrested him at the public library, he was found with a hard drive containing a bunch of pictures of me and hundreds of pages of stories he had written about stalking and raping me. It was really terrifying.”

She started the Instagram account, she told Dazed Magazine, "not so much a vendetta towards the perverts as it is a demonstration of what horrific things are said to women online when everyone else's heads are turned."

At the time of writing, the account has over 35,000 followers, one of them being Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn, who called out the irony of some of the unsavory comments on the posts that suggest Matsumiya should view the messages as a compliment.

Director James Gunn comments on Perv Magnet.

Ultimately, Matsumiya hopes that she can start a dialogue through these messages. So far, she's seen some success in that regard — her posts have inspired other women to share their stories, and she now posts submissions from women who have also been on the receiving end of online harassment."Personally, I don’t know any woman who hasn't been the recipient of creepy behaviour. It’s unacceptable and so depressingly rampant. I want my account to be a place where women can commiserate and men to just learn what women can experience online," she told Dazed.

"I don't know yet what can be done about it but I feel like the first step is definitely to shed light on the issue."