What To Do if You're Being Harassed Online
We can talk all day about empowerment and confidence, but these are not always effective remedies against being harassed online. There’s no way you can just strut and hold your head up high to get out of this kind of assault. Attackers can leverage the internet in a variety of ways to make you feel threatened OR to damage you and you need to take action to fight back.
First, what is online harassment?
At its most basic legal definition, “cyber-stalking is a repeated course of conduct that’s aimed at a person designed to cause emotional distress and fear of physical harm,” said Danielle Citron, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Francis King Carey School of Law. Citron is an expert in the area of cyber-stalking, and recently published the book called Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. Citron told me that cyber-stalking can include threats of violence (often sexual), spreading lies asserted as facts (like a person has herpes, a criminal record, or is a sexual predator), posting sensitive information online (whether that’s nude or compromising photos or social security numbers), and technological attacks (falsely shutting down a person’s social-media account). “Often, it’s a perfect storm of all these things,” she said.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/what-the-law-can-and-cant-do-about-online-harassment/382638/
Clearly there are innumerable methods and channels where people can harass you. There can be a variety of motives, including romantic rejection, personal or professional rivalry or sometimes it’s even random. I’d say it’s likely that we’ll all suffer some form of this harassment as the internet becomes a bigger part of our lives in quarantine.
What action can you take against hackers? Here is a guide for vulnerable populations.
Legal: Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, New Hampshire, and New York have included prohibitions against harassing electronic, computer or e-mail communications in their harassment legislation. Call the police.
Change passwords on your online accounts.
Strengthen your privacy settings on social media accounts.
Use two-factor authentication wherever you can.
Create an incident log to track everything that has happened.
For businesses—have all fake (Yelp, Google, Facebook, etc.) reviews removed.
This is something that hits close to home; my business was the target of online harassment in the past and it was terrifying. I’m not going to detail all that happened to me, just to say that someone decided they would try and wreck my business and mobilized her online friends to do so. I was inundated by DMs from her followers on every social platform and they went to the extent of publishing false reviews in order to damage my online reputation—even though they never verified the claims against me nor had any damage been done to them.
I spent a very stressful week locking down all of my personal and business accounts and flagging the fake reviews as fraudulent. Fortunately, I was able to emerge with more secure accounts and get the fake reviews taken down.
We’re only going to be more exposed as we’re more dependent on technology for our work and communication. It’s best to educate yourself and stay on top of any technologies and their vulnerabilities so you can have full peace of mind and focus on important things in life.
