Cyberbullying, the “willful and repeated harm inflicted through the use of computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices” has become a widespread phenomenon (“What is Cyberbullying?”, n.d., para 1). According to a Pew Research Center survey, 40% of people have been harassed online and 73% of people have witnessed someone else being harassed online (“HeartMob - End Online Harassment”, 2017). But although cyberbullying may be a relatively new phenomenon, bullying really is not. There are a few reasons why cyberbullying is a different beast - or is to an extent changing the relationship between the bully and the bullied.
If our current perception of bullying remind us of students in high school being pushed against lockers or being tormented with negative and hurtful words, there is a particular manifestation of bullying that hurts one’s privacy. It takes many forms, including doxing, the publishing of personal information; and revenge porn, “the non-consensual sharing of intimate image” (“HeartMob - End Online Harassment”, 2017). This means that a bully could go as far as looking for and accessing personal data of the person they want to bully and publish that information online with the purpose of doing them harm, in a way that was not possible before.
Being a bully has never been easier. The act of bullying is becoming more and more divorced from the consequences related to harassing people. If one in the past risked being exposed for being a bully - witnesses could testify to have been present as the bullying took place, and the bullied could point to who was doing the bullying - today that is no longer the case. A bully can hide behind the veil of anonymity offered to them by the internet. They can make up a fake account and harass people they know without the risk of being punished for their actions. In fact they can harass whoever they want. There is nothing to step them from tormenting in a variety of ways even strangers they disagree with. Some make of this a sort of hobby, and the internet has come up with a precise way to describe such people: a troll “is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting quarrels or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community...with the intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal, on-topic discussion, often for the troll’s amusement.” (Wikipedia, 2017)
Cyberbullying happens in our social and professional circles, it happens within our homes when your bully goes beyond domestic violence and harasses you online as well, and it can go as far as a victim feeling like the whole world has it for them.
Melania Trump made headlines when she announced her intention to combat cyberbullying as First Lady of the United States. This was particularly relevant given the combative online climate of the election season, with Donald Trump engaging in several “Twitter Wars” (Berenson 2016). This announcement came at a time where cyberbullying and young adult mental health has emerged in public opinion as a serious issue. While many people mistakenly assume that cyber bullying only occurs between school-aged children and teenagers, it is actually present in kinds of social circles, from schools to universities and the workplace.
Technology such as smartphones allows bullying to extend outside of school hours and property, leaving little room for the victim to rest and escape the harassment. Younger students often have a personal cell phone from an early age, and this has given rise to bullying through phone calls, text messages, and instant messaging. At the time of the study, video bullying was more rare, but already perceived as having a more negative impact than other forms of bullying (Smith et. al., 2008). In addition, the anonymous component increases the ease of online bullying. A study on the extent of cyberbullying in schools found that “close to half of the students were bully victims and about one in four had been cyber-bullied. Over half of the students reported that they knew someone being cyberbullied” (Li 2006). However, most of the victims and bystanders did not report the incidents to adults, limiting their ability to address the issues.
While cyberbullying has been commonly studied at a high school context, it is still present but underestimated on college campuses and the workplace. A more recent study in 2014 offers some insights on the unequal sources and impacts of bullying in the student population. With regards to causes, it found that a third of victims reported that their bullying was based on sexuality, race and ethnicity, or gender. In addition, women from the sample reported being bullied a rate five times higher than men. Most of the harassment occurred from sources close to the victims: “44% of students cyberbullied in college reported being bullied by a fellow student, 42% reported being cyberbullied by friends, 22.6% by a boyfriend or girlfriend, 22.6% by someone unknown to them, and 5.3% reported being cyberbullied by a co-worker” (Zalaquett and Chatters, 2014). This study also confirmed the strong negative impacts of cyberbullying on mental health and academic performance. Finally, a recent article in the Guardian tackles this issue in the workplace. Like their school aged counterparts, cyberbullies in the professional world aim “to humiliate, undermine and distress the person being targeted,” often without any response from upper management (Shearman, 2017). This issue has become more important with the increasingly blurred line between private and company time, with the rise of social media platforms used between coworkers. The lack of support for victims can be particularly difficult, and the women interviewed in the article had to resort to finding new jobs.
It is difficult to address the issue of cyberbullying in school and workplaces without touching on its effects on mental health, especially with regards to suicide and depression. Popular culture played an important role in bringing this issue into the international conversation. The Netflix series “13 Reasons Why,” released in March 2017 recounts a young girl’s choice to commit suicide after having suffered several instances of physical and online violence from her classmates. The show resonated with many younger audience members despite the graphic depictions of self-harm, probably because it echoes their “stories of cyberbullying and sexual assault, of sexual harassment on and offline, of anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation caused by abuses” (Sales, 2017).
In fact, several studies have shown the direct links between cyberbullying and its psychological impacts. For example, researchers found in 2010 that “youth who experienced traditional bullying or cyberbullying, as either an offender or a victim, had more suicidal thoughts and were more likely to attempt suicide than those who had not experienced such forms of peer aggression” (Hinduja, 2010). Further research shows that “victimization is associated with serious psychosocial, affective, and academic problems” (Tokunaga 2010). In general, there is a consensus that cyberbullying that can have important mental health repercussions for young students and adults, and that school administrators and policymakers need to address these developments linked to technology. In the meantime, civil society groups such as HeartMob have developed resources with information about privacy settings and online harassment reporting tools for multiple social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube (“Social Media Safety Guides,” 2017).
Like many other forms of violence and abuse, cybersecurity threats often come from people closest to the victim. In particular, current or former partners tend to engage in emotional abuse through control and online sexual violence. Hack*Blossom, an American based non-profit organization defending love in digital spaces, developed an online cybersecurity guide in response to domestic violence. The guide first helps victims identify potential threats before offering tools and solutions to protect their privacy and livelihood. Women experiencing abuse don’t always realize that “being intimidated by constant phone-calls, stalked by location-sharing apps, humiliated on social media, forced to share sensitive texts and passwords,” constitutes an invasion of privacy and emotional abuse (“Why Cybersecurity” 2016).
The Hack*Blossom guide discusses several common threat scenarios, all signs of controlling behavior and emotional abuse. Cell phone harassment by requiring constant check-ins is a very common form of abuse; it is a digital form of stalking. And just as offline abusers tend to isolate their victims from their social and support networks, partners who monitor social media for updates and post embarrassing content are looking to create distance and isolation. Location tracking in cell phone also makes it possible to have an extensive surveillance strategy, so the victim can never feel completely safe from the stalker. Accessing personal accounts by insisting to share passwords or gathering them maliciously through a Keylogger infringes on privacy makes the victim feel uncomfortable about searching for help and support (DIY Cybersecurity for Domestic Violence, 2016). Finally, the malicious sharing of sexual content online is a threat faced by many women today.
Technology and sex constantly interact: the first erotic movies were made in the late 19th century almost immediately after the invention of filmmaking (“Eugène Pirou,” 2017). We know that people “sext, send nudes, record videos, watch pornography: sexual content flows through our digital devices,” and will most likely continue to do so (“My Sex Life is Being Used Against Me,” 2016). Several feminist activists even claim that “making and sending selfies and nudes can be an exercise of self-determination and also an act of pleasurable resistance against racism, sexism, machismo, conservatism and heteronormativity” (“A Sexy Guide to Digital Security,” 2017). Sharing sexually intimate content with others is a matter of choice, trust, and respect, much like other aspects of sexuality.
However issues arise when sexual content shared under the assumption of trust and privacy get shared publicly without the consent of the person concerned. This mostly happens to women when former partners share past content online, usually after a breakup, and is known as “revenge porn.” This occurs in part because pictures are neither secure nor private once they are sent. In fact, “screenshots allow intimate photos to be easily duplicated, even if the original is deleted, [and] social media, forums, and pornography websites readily share sexual content without concern for consent.” Once shared, pictures or videos live in the recipient’s devices, apps, cloud, or websites, making it very difficult to delete it completely (“My Sex Life is Being Used Against Me,” 2016).
Once shared online, this content can have very difficult and painful implications for the victim, both online and offline. When engaging in revenge porn, offenders often share images with the victim’s friends, family, and even employers through social media platforms or email with offending messages (“Revenge Porn and Internet Privacy,” 2017). The sharing of personal and identifiable information, including addresses and work locations take the online threats of violence into the physical world. Many offenders not only want to share images, but aim to make their victim identifiable online to encourage further harassment by strangers. It is common to find details about the victim such as their “full name, age, address, employer, e-mail address, social media screenshots, social security number, and school” next to their pictures (“Revenge Porn and Internet Privacy,” 2017). Some even go further and impersonate their victims and “create ads on Craigslist or Backpage soliciting sex and providing personal information encouraging strangers to come to the victim’s home or workplace expecting sex,” which creates true risk of physical sexual violence for the victim in addition to the emotional abuse (“Revenge Porn and Internet Privacy,” 2017).
There are very few legal resources and solutions for cybercrimes such as revenge porn, though specialized law firms do exist. As with other recent crimes and ethical issues concerning data privacy and cybersecurity, most governments and institutions have not developed appropriate laws in time. New York based C.A. Goldberg, PLLC, focuses on its practice on “Internet privacy and abuse, domestic violence, and sexual consent” (“Internet Abuse and Sexual Consent Lawyers,” 2017). The firm advises a series of legal and technical responses to the non-consensual distribution of sexual images, several of which are specific to the United States. The first steps often are the “confirmation of suspect's identity via social media sites, website hosts and/or IP addresses; motions against online service providers to de-anonymize users’ identities, and de-indexing from Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines,” followed by Cease and Desist letter, and the “removal of content pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)” (“Revenge Porn and Internet Privacy,” 2017). Restraining orders and lawsuits are also possible.
Finally, the Brazilian organization Coding Rights created a guide on how to send safer nude pictures in order to prevent revenge porn from occurring. This approach acknowledges the importance of technology in sexuality today and offers women the agency to protect their privacy at the source. For example, “apps like Obscuracam lets [people] pixelate faces and other body and background details” and Photo Exif Editor can get rid of potentially identifying metadata attached to photos (“Safer Nudes,” 2016). Improved cybersecurity literacy and better legal responses could reduce the instances of sexual cyber-violence such as revenge porn.
We have so far seen that cyberbullying can happen within an intimate relationship or within one’s social and professional circles. It does not, however, stop there. Cyberbullying has become the weapon of choice for those keen to police “unwanted” voices in the public sphere. It is no accident that those who are more likely to be the target of cyberbullying are women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ folks - all members of other groups.
Most of the time these people are subjected to hate speech, “abuse that directly targets a unique factor beyond the control of the recipient” (“Ditch The Label | Brandwatch”, 2016). Attacking a woman for being a woman, or someone who is black for being black, hate speech is widespread. A study by Brandwatch and Ditch the Label that analysed 19 million tweets across a 4 year period found that found that racism, homophobia and transphobia are the most prevalent form of hate speech on Twitter.
In 2014 Eron Gjoni posted a 10,000 word manifesto against his ex-girlfriend Zoe Quinn, very much a smear and online harassment manifesto. This was the beginning of Gamergate: online harassment against Zoe, a video game maker, and many other women in the gaming industry by mainly men who thought women do not belong in the industry. Her ex-boyfriend had accused her, among other things, of sleeping with a video-game reviewer to get a favourable review. This proved to be false, but it did not matter.
Zoe “became an avatar for everything the male-dominated gaming subculture detested or feared” (Illing, 2017), a woman who was not playing fair. She had been outspoken about gender inequality in the industry, and this manifesto gave many the licence to send her personal messages threatening her and her life. They went as far as finding her and her father’s home addresses and phone numbers and persecuted her and her family both online and offline. This is just a high profile example of how cyberbullying can move from the intimate - a relationship between two individuals - to what seems like the whole world attacking and persecuting one person, going as far as using as weapon one’s personal data.
These kind of attacks focused on exposing one’s personal data, or doxing, are also being used for opposers of political regimes. FindFace, a facial recognition app in Russia, allow users to photograph people in the crowd and identify them by putting them against profile pictures on the social network Vkontakte, with 70% reliability (Walker, 2017). Imagine the possible implications. This would be the end of facial anonymity and could be the beginning of online as well as offline targeting of those who do not subscribe to the norm everywhere. Someone sees a person protesting at a rally, they take a picture, find who the face belongs to using FindFace and proceeds to expose them on social media, attack them and lead to the person protesting losing their jobs, receiving a great amount of online harassments from others.
This is already happening in other forms. It is not necessarily done through FindFace or a similar platform, but it is painstakingly done manually by not only trolls, haters, but by cyber activists, fighting against injustice and for the “greater good”.
When the ones doxing are cyber activists...
A few questions come to mind. Should doxing not be allowed in all cases? Why do these people find the need to dox in the first place - using what can be considered an evil tool for the good of society?
Following the racist rally in Charlottesville where many angry white supremacists took the streets with torches and one woman was left dead, many activists decided to take matters in their hands and expose these racist human beings. Do an online search for the words “Charlottesville racist rally doxing” and their exploits are there for you to see.
The man behind the Twitter account “Yes, You’re Racist” , summed up why he worked hard to expose the alleged racists who took part in the rally: “These aren’t just random faces in a crowd, these are real people. A lot of times, they are in our communities. They could be your neighbours, your co workers, people you pass in the grocery store and I think it’s really important to put a spotlight on these people.” (Pasha-Robinson, 2017). One might feel some sympathy for these white supremacists as doxing leads to real life consequences: one man was fired from his job and another was allegedly disowned by his family after taking part in the Charlottesville rally (Samuels, 2017). However, what happens when activists dox the wrong person? This has indeed happened as reported by the New York Times (Victor, 2017). Can that innocent person’s privacy and data be sacrificed for the greater good - i.e. exposing white supremacists?
Cyberbullying is a real problem, hate speech online is just as big and cyber activists’ decisions to employ the same tactics that haters and trolls use online is very much them jumping in the grey area.
What is clear is that more should be done by platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit to regulate and police hate speech. The fact that a whole study on cyberbullying and hate speech could be conducted using social media data retrieved from Twitter is telling us that not enough is being done by the platform to stop cyberbullying from spreading like wildfire. Reddit - the American online community board and social news aggregator - has taken steps in the right direction by closing down some of their spaces where users promoted hate speech (McRae, 2017). Twitter and Facebook, though they are working to reduce these instances, have a long way to go to make their own corners of the internet safer. Perhaps only then cyber activists will see no need to dox perceived anti-justice users.
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