On Friday, October 30th, I attended the concluding event of Skidmore College’s second annual Skidmore Speaks event series, designed to promote online safety and create a community-wide conversation about the freedom of expression in social media. This event, presented by PEN America and Hollaback!, was called “Bystander Intervention: How to be an Ally when you Witness Online Abuse” and was a workshop designed to teach the community just that. I was excited to attend this event because as someone who is active in both journalism and the online social community, I know how harmful online abuse can be and how important it is to have strategies to combat the hatred so many of us have received.
To give some brief background information about the presenters and their organizations, Hollaback!, which was represented in this event by their Co-Founder and Executive Director, Emily May, has a mission of “end[ing] harassment in all its forms by transforming the culture that perpetuates hate and harassment.” The other presenter, Viktorya Vilk, is the Program Director of Digital Safety and Free Expression at PEN America, an organization dedicated to protecting the freedom of expression in literature and journalism.
First, it is important to understand what online abuse is. PEN America defines this behavior as “the severe or pervasive targeting of an individual or group in an online setting through harmful behaviors.” This type of harassment goes by many names, including but not limited to: online abuse, cyber abuse, online harassment, and cyber harassment. For this article, I will mainly be using the term online abuse. Online abuse can take form in many ways, such as hate speech, doxing, threats, dog-piling (a coordinated attack by a group of abusers), online impersonation, “Zoom bombing” (a tactic we have seen rise in popularity since the start of the coronavirus pandemic), and the nonconsensual spreading of intimate photos.
It is reported that 44 percent of Americans have experienced online abuse. While it can and does affect just about everyone, a study by YouGov presented in the workshop shows that, unsurprisingly, demographic minorities tend to be more susceptible to this type of behavior. Some groups that are more likely to be subject to online abuse are members of the LGBTQ+ community, folks of Jewish or Muslim faith, African and Asian Americans, and Latinx folks. Also remember that online abusers often do not target people just because of one of their identities: the presenters explained that intersectionality plays a large role in the amount of online hatred one can receive. Online abuse can have many negative impacts on one’s psychological and mental health, their social or financial status, their community, and the broader state of human rights.
Now for the real portion of both the workshop and my purpose here: what can I do when I see online abuse? How can we, as Vilk eloquently put it, “make the Internet a more diverse and equitable place”? There are first a couple of qualifications I am going to make about bystander intervention and online allyship. First, May and Vilk made it clear that being a bystander is not about being a hero. This can be hard to keep in mind, especially for us white folks who tend to act with a white savior complex, but the ultimate goal of bystander intervention is to take care of those being harassed and give the power back to them. The second piece of advice we were given was to take our own safety and security into account when deciding when and how to intervene in cases of online abuse, since being an ally does indeed put you at increased risk as well.
May and Vilk then presented the “5Ds of Bystander Intervention,” which were developed by Hollaback! and are a quick and easy way to decide how to respond to a situation of online abuse.
Distract: de-escalate the emotions of the person being harassed by amplifying their original content and drawing attention away from the abuse. Send a funny gif or meme!
Delegate: if you do not feel comfortable handling the situation head-on, delegate the situation to someone else. But first, check with the victim and rally support for them from others in the online community!
Document: take screenshots of the abuse and save hyperlinks to the content.
Delay: check in with the person who has been harassed. Listen to them and affirm that their feelings are valid; make sure especially not to gaslight them. Also, offer specific help and see what they need.
Direct: address the abuser and speak up if you feel safe!
In short, the three steps of becoming a bystander to an ally are:
Understand the situation and assess whether you feel comfortable putting yourself at risk of abuse by becoming involved.
Understand that your concerns are valid reasons to not get involved if you do not feel comfortable.
Decide if one of the 5Ds works for you and make a plan to get involved!
Online abuse is real, harmful, and it is growing each day as technology becomes more advanced and as our society becomes more divided. It is important, now more than ever, that we are equipped to stand up for others and commit towards ending online abuse. When I reached out to the presenters after the workshop for their final words, Vilk stated that “each and every one of us has the power and the responsibility to transform the culture of online spaces to be inclusive and open, rather than abusive and narrow. The more folks intervene in online abuse in safe and effective ways, the better digital platforms will work for everyone.”
All information in this article was taken from Hollaback!, PEN America, and May and Vilk’s workshop. Here are some extra resources provided by May and Vilk:
HeartMob, an online community forum for online harassment: https://iheartmob.org/
PEN America’s Online Harassment Field Manual: https://onlineharassmentfieldmanual.pen.org/
Hollaback!’s Calendar for Bystander Intervention Training: https://www.ihollaback.org/harassmenttraining/