Cyberstalked

So, more about avoid­ing inter­net harass­ment. In part one of this series I advised you not to use guest­books on your web site and to be care­ful about which chat rooms you use. Part two dis­cussed instant mes­sag­ing pro­grams. Now we’ll talk about unmod­er­ated forums.

Whether it’s a news­group or a web-based dis­cus­sion board, par­tic­i­pat­ing any forum might expose you to posts that you won’t like. In unmod­er­ated forums, though, you won’t have any recourse no mat­ter how offen­sive the mes­sages might be.

Use fil­ters in news­groups, use PGP to make it dif­fi­cult to believ­ably forge posts from you—but grow a thick skin to deal with nasty posts, as well. As far as web-based dis­cus­sion boards go, I wouldn’t per­son­ally post to any that don’t use unique, ver­i­fi­able user IDs (with pass­words, of course) for each user and have good anti-harassment poli­cies which they enforce. In my expe­ri­ence, Yahoo is absolutely shame­ful about not enforc­ing their policies—they sel­dom even respond to com­plaints with any­thing but an autore­sponse form let­ter. I sug­gest that any­one con­cerned about harass­ment avoid their mes­sage boards, online games, chat venues and mes­sen­ger client. While Del­phi seems to be bet­ter about giv­ing forum man­agers tools to keep out known trolls, they don’t seem to take much real action against users who vio­late their poli­cies. I’ve yet to receive any reports of prob­lems from peo­ple using Six Degrees but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been problems.

There are cer­tain peo­ple referred to as “trolls” who appar­ently live to upset peo­ple. They don’t nec­es­sar­ily even hold the opin­ions they express in their own messages—they say what­ever is most likely to annoy and dis­rupt those in a par­tic­u­lar forum. So they’ll come into soc.support.fat-acceptance or alt.support.big-folks and tell every­one to go on a diet, or pop into soc.religion.pagan claim­ing that they’re try­ing to con­vert all the Wic­cans to Chris­tian­ity, or go into alt.support.childfree claim­ing that any­body who doesn’t want chil­dren is a sick per­vert. I have, in fact, seen the same troll post­ing in abor­tion and anti-abortion forums, just to get peo­ple riled up. They often like to cross-post dis­cus­sion threads between two such anti­thet­i­cal news­groups, then sit back and watch the flames roar. Don’t respond to trolls. Don’t give them feed­back. Report them pri­vately to their ISPs if you must, but it’s usu­ally a waste of time and effort. Even if they say nasty things in direct response to your own posts, they aren’t nec­es­sar­ily harass­ing you—it is likely that you are a tar­get of opportunity.

If you can’t deal with trolls, only par­tic­i­pate in mod­er­ated forums. If you aren’t sure as to whether or not a par­tic­u­lar forum is mod­er­ated, ask who­ever is in charge of it.

If you’re con­cerned about harass­ment in gen­eral, there’s much more infor­ma­tion to be found on WHOA’s Stay­ing Safe Online page.

As you’re get­ting to know some­one online, you need to be very care­ful about the infor­ma­tion you make avail­able to him or her. If you’re con­sid­er­ing meet­ing some­one in per­son after get­ting to know him or her online, there are other considerations—enough so that I had to put them in another arti­cle. Check for it tomorrow.

Orig­i­nally pub­lished Decem­ber 12, 2000