How to Support Researchers and Analysts Who Are Targeted Online for Their Work

Online individuals, communities, and bots are increasingly harassing researchers who focus on volatile or sensitive subjects—especially those who work on extremism and far right movement projects.

While researchers may want to isolate themselves to avoid this behavior, that isolation can make things worse—both for their mental health and personal safety. Instead, researchers and analysts can benefit from the support of their institutions and a community of other researchers focused on difficult subjects, according to The Rise of Online Harm: Individual, Community, and Institutional Strategies to Protect Researchers.

The chapter by Audrey Gagnon at the School of Politics at the University of Ottowa and Tamta Gelashvili at the University of Oslo is part of a broader volume about navigating online violence against researchers, and it explores online violence against academics and countermeasures for creating a more resilient academic environment. Below are some top takeaways for supporting researchers that are the targets of online abuse efforts.

Community Support

When a single researcher feels isolated or targeted, it can help him or her to have support from other researchers who also focus on difficult topics. This support system can provide a space for mentorship and offer guidance for dealing with the various challenges involved in a research project.

Supportive measures that this group can take include:

• Providing awareness on the risk of online harm, so researchers better anticipate and prepare for the safety-related challenges of their work.
  
  
• Sharing experiences, advice, and support on lessons learned and how to mitigate harm.
  
  
• Collaborating and disseminating research together, decreasing the likelihood that an individual researcher is targeted.
  
  
• Providing mentorship and emotional reflectivity.
  
  

Institutional Support

Most organizations with research endeavors have policies that deal with physical harassment or abuse, but only a limited number of institutions address how to protect and support researchers subjected to online harm.

This lack of a policy and procedure is especially dangerous because people who are skeptical of science and far-right supporters routinely organize to silence academics and researchers.

Instead, institutions can take a variety of measures to better support their researchers in the face of harassment and online abuse. These include:

• Educating institutional management and researchers on the risks involved in their work and ways to protect themselves.
  
  
• Giving researchers the agency to negotiate their visibility—allowing the researcher to control the information published about him or herself and their research, including when its published, and where it is published.
  
  
• Encouraging collaborative work and collective dissemination of research findings.
  
  
• Creating a clear procedure for researchers to report instances of online harm.
  
  
• Creating support teams of communications, IT, legal, and security staff that can act in response to incidents.
  
  
• Defining specific protocols to follow in response to online harm.
  
  
• Investing in software services that remove personal information about individual researchers from the Internet.
  
  
• Offering cybersecurity, social media, and harassment training.
  
  
• Publicly supporting researchers experiencing online harm.
  
  
• Offering cybersecurity, social media, and harassment assistance, as well as psychological and legal support.
  
  
• Supporting researchers when they report incidents to the authorities.
  
  

Individual Strategies

Even with the support of a community and institution, researchers still need to cultivate their own means of preventing or reacting to online harm, operating under the assumption that they can become targets.

These measures include:

• Being aware of the potential for online harm when engaging with the public.
  
  
• Enhancing your cybersecurity practices, such as deleting personal information online, using strong passwords, turning on multi-factor authentication, and monitoring your online personal information.
  
  
• Creating an action plan to initiate if you become the target of online harm, including identifying a support network and the relevant authorities.
  
  

Additional mitigation measures include:

• Adopting a feminist ethics of care, such as prioritizing your own wellbeing and personal safety.
  
  
• Documenting every instance of harm as evidence by taking screenshots of relevant comments, messages, and abusers’ profile pages.
  
  
• Disabling social media notifications and ask someone you trust to keep tabs on social media mentions or comments, letting that person notify you if they see something that requires attention.
  
  
• Finding help, including psychological support, when online abuse happens.
  
  
• Reporting online harm to social media platforms and law enforcement, if applicable.

If you’re experiencing a mental health struggle, emotional distress, or just need someone to talk to, the International Association for Suicide Prevention provides a helpline assistant to connect you with a crisis helpline in your country. Access it here.

Sara Mosqueda is an associate editor for Security Management. Connect with her on LinkedIn or send her an email, [email protected].

Correction, 24 March: This article originally cited the incorrect authors for the study mentioned.