Center for Health Communication
Recognize and understand online harassment
Recognize and understand online harassment
What does online harassment look like?
What tactics are part of online harassment?
- Astroturfing: coordinated online behaviors meant to mislead audiences about the scale or intensity of public opinion. Example: a small number of people could use fake profiles to make social media backlash appear as if it is coming from a large crowd.
- Concern trolling: the use of positive language to frame an antagonistic message. Example: someone might say they support the goals of your public health research, while raising objections in the form of far-fetched hypotheticals.
- Cyberbullying: the use of web technologies to humiliate someone or shame them in front of others. Example: someone might make public posts to personally insult a health professional.
- Cyberstalking: the use of web technologies to repeatedly invade someone’s privacy, especially across platforms and communication services. Example: someone might send threatening messages to a public health official across all of their professional and personal social media accounts, as well as their professional and personal email accounts.
- Deepfake: a computer-generated image or audio/video clip that provides a false “record” of something that never actually happened. Example: someone might feed footage of real press briefings into software to create a clip purportedly showing a health policy announcement that never happened.
- Dogpiling: when a large number of coordinated accounts respond negatively to a social media user. Example: a large group might post insulting comments on a promotional video for a vaccine that a celebrity spotlighted for them.
- Dog-whistle: the use of in-group codes and double meanings to mask a harmful message. Example: someone might evoke harmful stereotypes while demeaning a health official through careful wording so as to not breach a platform’s terms of service or face content moderation.
- Doxing: when someone publicly shares another person’s private information. Example: someone might publicly share a scientist’s home address and cell phone number online.
- Hashtag hijacking: the coordinated use of an existing social media hashtag to drown out the intended messaging. Example: a coordinated group might use a vaccination campaign’s hashtag to amplify vaccine disinformation and personal attacks against medical professionals.
- Impersonation: posting content with the aim of deceiving others into thinking it came from someone else. Example: someone might make a social media account to post offensive messages under a doctor’s name and photo, with the goal of harming their professional reputation.
- Targeting: abusive behaviors that cross a boundary between one’s professional and personal life. Example: someone might harass a health professional’s child as a means of intimidation.
- Swatting: falsely reporting someone to law enforcement so as to get a SWAT team to confront them.