By Sarah Frazier
Online, women are subjected to harassment, violence, oppression, and just generally uncomfortable situations that few (if any) men have to deal with. The Economist Intelligence Unit conducted a study reporting that 85% of women worldwide had witnessed online violence against other women. In the EU alone, 10% of women report having experienced cyber-harassment since age 15.
The effects of cyber harassment can be debilitating and have real-life consequences such as low self-esteem, insomnia, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Fortunately, the ever-growing awareness of cyber violence against women has brought with it some useful tools and strategies for preventing and addressing online harassment.
You have a right to feel safe in your own skin and participate in the world in all of its forms. With this cyber safety guide, you’ll have the tools you need to minimize, prevent, and handle the many different forms of online harassment.
How to Protect Yourself from Social Media Harassment
The most frequent social media users worldwide are 15-year-old girls, and unfortunately, this is also the age at which most girls report their first encounter with online harassment. While young girls typically learn better strategies for managing online harassment as they age and continue using social media, 42% of women’s behavioral response toward harassment is still simply to ignore it.
Harassment on social media isn’t limited to women alone, but there’s no denying that social media harassment is far worse for women than it is for men. Women have to deal with disgusting comments about their bodies, unsolicited dick pics, death threats, rape threats, and worse. And studies show that trans women are even more at risk for incurring violence on and offline. Online transphobia and harassment towards trans women often involves intentional misgendering, deadnaming, and transphobic slurs, all of which take a significant toll on trans women’s mental health and self-esteem.
It’s not all bad news, though. Women everywhere are empowering themselves with social media to call attention to these issues and more, mainly through the #metoo movement. Beyond drawing attention to the violence and maltreatment individual women experience, the movement is awakening the world to the larger systemic issues women face.
We have the right to feel safe in person, and we deserve to feel secure online. Protecting yourself from social media harassment doesn’t mean you have to delete your accounts and lose touch with your network, though.
There are actually a lot of things you can do to protect yourself and still participate. Some sites and apps have platform-specific options, but there are some general guidelines and tips that apply everywhere.
To make things easy. I’ve outlined both things women can do in general and platform-specific features that can keep you safe.
SOCIAL MEDIA BEST PRACTICES
The first thing you should do when someone starts harassing you or you see someone being harassed is to block and report them. This isn’t an ideal system, because we know from past controversies that clear harassment sometimes gets ignored and people can make new accounts after you block them. But at least this way, the person can’t contact you anymore.
Pretty much all apps and websites give you the ability to prevent others from tagging, manage who can send you direct messages, and control your discoverability. You may want to leave your profile open on some sites and make it very private on others, but I highly recommend at the very least choosing the options that don’t allow strangers to DM you. Once I did that, it made my inbox a much friendlier place to be.
It’s nearly never a good idea to tag your exact location on social media in the moment. This leaves you open to stalking and makes your profiles much easier for random weirdos to find. If you do want to share your location, do it after you’ve left or choose something more general. For example, choose the city you’re in — not the neighborhood.
Be mindful of whose friend requests you accept. If their name and profile picture don’t ring a bell and you have no mutual friends, it’s probably not a good idea to accept. These followers could be scammers, bots, or, worst of all, a “finsta” (fake Instagram) account. Finstas are becoming a popular way to hide what you’re doing from other people as well as stalk people who have blocked them. If you do accept requests from people you don’t know or from business accounts, be careful not to share too much personal information.
