Online Harassment

Online Harassment in the United States

Cyberbullying and Harassment

Cyberbullying and Harassment include online threats, harassment, and negative comments, and also stalking through emails, websites, social networks and text messages.

Bullying and Harassment

It can involve verbal abuse and name calling, offensive graffiti or post and can be received via text message, emails or social networking sites like Facebook or Linkedin.

Social Media Harassment

By Chris Ridder. He is a partner at Ridder, Costa & Johnstone in San Francisco, represents individuals and companies on intellectual property, privacy, and other issues involving technology and law.

(…) A challenge for people harassed on social media, and for their advocates, is that the Communications Decency Act of 1996 gives Twitter and other companies immunity from liability related to hosting harassing communications. (See 47 U.S.C. § 230.) Companies are not required to remove content as long as it doesn’t infringe intellectual property rights. But they are likely to face many more difficult—and very public—judgment calls.

(…) The Pew Research Center reported in October that 40 percent of Internet users had experienced harassment—which disproportionately affects young adults, women, and minorities. This spring Women, Action, and the Media (WAM) released an analysis of 800 harassment reports it received about activity on Twitter during three weeks in November 2014. About 12 percent of the reports were linked to GamerGate. Among all the reports, the most common types of harassment included:

  • hate speech (27 percent);
  • doxing (22 percent);
  • threats of violence (12 percent);
  • posting of false information including libel (9 percent);
  • impersonation (4 percent); and
  • revenge porn (3 percent).

Other forms of harassment accounted for 22 percent of reports. In 2013 California prohibited revenge porn (distributing an intimate image of someone in violation of an understanding that the image was to remain private) with the adoption of Penal Code section 647(j)(4). A year later the section was expanded to include “selfies.” A number of other states have similar laws. (…)

And, among others, feminist blogger and media critic Anita Sarkeesian—who had been harassed since 2012 after launching a media-criticism project called Tropes vs Women in Video Games—received such virulent threats that she fled her home and in October canceled a speech at Utah State University, after the school received a threat of “the deadliest school shooting in American history.”

It now appears that the noninterference approach by social media companies could give way to a new order in which they are more responsive to user concerns about harmful posts. Twitter took action on at least half of the reports that WAM highlighted in each category, generally by suspending the alleged harasser’s account. Before the study’s results were published, then-CEO Dick Costolo indicated that he would like to see Twitter better handle harassment reports. In an internal memo first reported by The Verge, Costolo said “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.” Just a few years earlier, he had called Twitter “the free speech wing of the free speech party.”

Costolo said abuse results in users leaving Twitter, and he promised “to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them.” After Costolo’s statement, Twitter tripled the size of its team handling abuse reports, added rules specifically prohibiting revenge porn, streamlined its reporting procedures, made it easier to report threats to Twitter and to law enforcement, and added a new filter that it said would remove tweets that contain “threats, offensive or abusive language, duplicate content” or were sent from suspicious accounts.

In March (2015), Reddit prohibited the posting of several types of content, including anything copyrighted or confidential; violent personalized images; and unauthorized photos or videos of subjects who are nude, sexually excited, or engaged in sexual conduct. Reddit co-founder and executive chairman Alexis Ohanian said the company had “missed a chance” in September 2014 to be a leader in privacy during its own high-profile content scandal, which involved the posting of hundreds of private nude photos of celebrities, apparently obtained without authorization from those celebrities’ backup data stored on Apple’s iCloud. Then-CEO Yishan Wong explained that Reddit generally tries not to interfere with user-submitted content.

The company also left in place many other subreddits (conversation threads) with the potential for harassing content, including ones on “raping women” and “white rights,” though new CEO Steve Huffman said in July that Reddit planned to ban the “raping women” thread. Acting CEO Ellen Pao had departed the week before.

Facebook updated its standards in March to increase transparency and clarity but said the move was consistent with how they always were applied. Among other issues, the update focused on “bullying and harassment, criminal activity, sexual violence and exploitation, nudity, hate speech, and violence and graphic content.”

Implementing stronger policies to monitor users’ posts for harassment presents new challenges for social media companies. Their corporate lawyers and leaders are accustomed to addressing intellectual property complaints submitted by professional IP owners according to processes that are well-defined by statute. In contrast, complaints about harassment, revenge porn, impersonation, doxing, and related practices are much more difficult to review and investigate. And companies now may feel they must make finer-grained value judgments about content.


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