BlogHer - What do you do when you're cyberstalked, taunted or abused online? - Comments

Setting Safe Boundaries for Blogging

kyranp — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:38:03 -0500

What a great, practical thread. Boundaries and blogging is my very favorite blogging subject.

My site has been relatively troll-free. I have one reader whose patterns concern me (they seem to be overly interested in my photos, and they live here in my town), but nothing really bad yet.

I have been very careful and deliberate in determining what my boundaries are with regard to the blog. I started out anonymously, and "came out" more as I became more comfortable with the medium. I figured it would be easier than trying to shut the gate after the proverbial horse got out.

After a year and a half on the block, I can say that whatever this cost me in terms of traffic -- I didn't exactly blaze onto the scene-- it's been well worth it. I am (so far) blessedly free of the cyberbahn rubberneckers and bottom feeders. Also, it has given me time to work out the separation between the blog and me, and that has helped me a lot with the rare time I have run into hostility. I remind myself that the person is responding to the blog, not me. They know the blog, not me. They are criticizing the blog, not me. And so on. My blog is a slice of life, that I choose to put in the public eye. It is not my totality.

I am not my blog.

I think both bloggers and readers get confused about that distinction, especially in cases where the fourth wall is extremely transparent, and the reader feels like they really know the person, and that they are somehow participating in that person's world. Not to excuse the trolls, but the illusion of intimacy is a double edge sword and the blogger who creates it needs to be aware that they can fall on it.

People who publish in books or other traditional media have an infrastructure that prepares them for public exposure. The drawback of instant access is that people are hanging stuff out there without protection.

Hope there will lots more about this at the Conference

Kyran, Notes to Self

I took my blog down too...

zchamu — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:04:33 -0500

I was an oldschool blogger.. I started blogging in 2000 and had actually gotten a nice little pack of regulars. However, I got a stalker.. someone from my real life who scared the living daylights out of me. At that time I decided that I didn't really want to be so exposed on the web, and took my whole blog down. Which is something I regret now, because I had some great entries.

At any rate, this time around in the blogosphere I have to be very conscious about developing a thicker skin. There are a lot of nasty trolls out there. And there are people who disagree with what I write, which is cool, but who are total jerks about it, which is not cool. Not taking that personally is pretty tough.

ThreeSeven... not just a number anymore

Stalkers and bullies

letha — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 16:40:15 -0500

I moderate an online forum, and we have of late had a couple of incidents where members have been bullied.

We tend to follow a zero tolerance approach, yet at the same time with private messaging going on behind the scenes we often see that the victim isn't so innocent. With one incidence we had to enforce that both parties ignored each other.

When it gets to the point of people actually ganging up on a single member we track the ring leader down, have words, give warnings and if the worst comes to it ban them even if it's for a short period.

What to do in the big wide internet I have no idea, I can track IP's through my stat counter, that doesn't help much if the authorities refuse to do anything though. My partner was stalked, he reported it, this happened both in real life and via the internet the police (UK) were very good about it and once his stalker found out the police were involved and complaints had been made she backed off.

Letha
A Stitch in Time

Cyber Stalkers

AmandaBrumfield — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 14:16:19 -0500

I recently shut down my personal blog after a full 12 months of being stalked and harassed by a particular group of people. I tried ignoring them, I tried confronting them- nothing worked. These people were obsessed and ruthless. I resent the idea that there might have been some magical solution, that my action or lack there of contributed to this harassment. I had a right to my little space online, without being followed from site to site, slandered, and bullied. When one of these people called my father's unlisted home phone number, I decided I'd had enough and I walked away from the blog.

The scariest part of this for me was that most of the law enforcement authorities I spoke with about this informed me that "if I didn't want to be harassed on the internet, I shouldn't have a website". This attitude infuriates me- it's eerily similiar to the "well you shouldn't have worn that skirt in public" attitude.

Human beings have rights, even on the nasty ol' internet.

Scary Post

Purple Woman — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 09:29:30 -0500

"Blogtards", I love it. We have so much fun with our new blogging lexicon!

Seriously, a 4,000-word post scared me so much that I decided to close my personal blog and go underground to create a private one for family and friends - by invitation only. I plan to follow the links you provide here to report this individual's suspicious post to authorities. I did report the incident to Blogger.com, but they took a week just to send me a cookie-cutter reply. Now, I realize they are not the right recipient of the notice. To put it mildly, this post read like it was written by the next Unibomber. Very scary pontificating, slurring almost everyone, from lesbians to blacks. Very narcissistic. Even worse, it didn't have anything to do with my original post! This made me think that this attention-freak was posting this all over the Internet and some authority should be alerted. What a blogtard.

I'd like to know if anyone else had seen something like this?

I had been thinking about letting go of my personal blog for a while so I can focus on my more professional blog. It's not monetized, I just take it more seriously. I even have a proofreader.

I thought this more controversial, topical blog would potentially draw the ire, so upon launch I put carefully worded Ground Rules up in the sidebar to spell out fair play. I think that really worked. I recently modified those ground rules to simply say "keep it clean, not mean". I didn't think I had to spell out that if they don't, their comment will simply be deleted. I have only had to do that twice in two years of blogging. I hate to do that because it's all about the dialogue.

This experience has also prompted me to get a PO box so that I can change my domain registration and still have my home address unknown. I also will be using this on my checks going forward. I am sure there will be other uses. A small box only costs $40 per anum in my town and is well worth the extra protection.

Lisa,
Thanks for this post and the links. Very topical.

Teri Tith
Childfree Blogger & Founder
Purple Women & Friends
www.PurpleWomen.org

Strategies from online teaching

mcmilker — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 08:34:48 -0600

This has been a great read for me. I have not been struck by Internet Trolls yet, but I await them trembling. I have however taught online for 6 years and think; IMHO, perhaps some of the strategies that work there might also work for trolls.

I agree ignoring them can be an effective strategy. I have also found though that responding with kindness and agreement helps too. Just today, I watched a blogger from a fairly large blog, respond to a comment about poor writing on the site, with a snap that, more or less, said, â€œ quit complaining; if you donâ€™t like it; donâ€™t read itâ€, Yikes!

My response would have been. â€œIâ€™m glad you brought that up! I know my writing is not always the best. I have something to say, but donâ€™t always say it well :-) This is a skill on which I am working, as most of we bloggers are! Iâ€™d love it if you had some resources to share with me to improve writing!â€

This type of response, I believe works particularly well with women â€“ but also some men. From years of averting â€œflame warsâ€ in the online classroomâ€¦this is my best strategyâ€¦oh, yes, I agreeâ€¦ignore and delete is a great option if option A doesnâ€™t work!

MC Milker

Requires Discernment, All tollers are not the same

Nordette — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 12:50:33 -0600

Usually I ignore them; however, there are some people who seem to assume you're afraid and so escalate situations when they realize they're being ignored. At this point, I usually tell them what I think of them, let them know that I will not give them public coverage in anyway, (No Hope for link!; so many seem to be after attention as in hoping I'll speak of them in a blog post or something), and then I stick to my guns.

I got quite a few trollers after I wrote about Sheriff Jack Strain down in Slidell, La., and his comments on people from New Orleans, meaning black people, and people who wear dreadlocks. Despite his defense later that he spoke of the actual criminals in a particular case, many who saw the video could see he spoke of black people from New Orleans in general. Some of his supporters were quite nasty. One in particular made it a point to attack my literary work, which had nothing to do with the Jack Strain issue. Once I let him know privately that I would never respond publicly to his nonsense and that I would no longer answer privately, and equally important, I'd never allow his comments to post on any of my sites. He moved on.

After dealing with my ex who for a time watched everything I did online, I invested in some serious statistics programs that picked up IP addresses. Unless you're dealing with a genuinely dangerous, devious person, most trollers stop when they realize you know their IPs, which is how I nipped a lot of nastiness in the bud during the Jack Strain thing. I responded to a few of the meaner anonymous commenters who returned calling themselves by different names by posting the their IP addresses and their locations. I guess the redistribution in power unnerved them. If you're trying to be nasty with a sheet over your head, but realize I see through the sheet, then game over.

My ex chilled out after my attorney made it clear he would bring the behavior to the attention of law enforcement and once he realized I even knew it was him when he'd stop at a computer kiosk in airports before he went to his apartment just to check on me. I'm not sure what that was about since he was usually on his way back from visiting his girlfriend in California, but since I'd been told this type of behavior in a former spouse or lover can be a precursor to them doing you bodily harm, I didn't take it lightly.

I'm not sure he ever understood that I simply recognized his IP when I saw it or I recognized his patterns when he used someone else's pc. In that instance, ignoring him was not the option. I'd write about the "stalking" because I wasn't speaking to him during the divorce. I think it helped him to see that those who commented found his behavior abusive and usually gave me advice on how to press charges. Significant-other stalking is probably not what you're talking about though.

There was a woman I should've ignored, but didn't. She began copying whatever I did as though we were in some kind of competition that no one told me about. If she read I was doing a certain thing, then she would try to do something similar and beat me to it. She also started a campaign against me on a site that where she thought she should be the only "star." Spooky. I let her know I was aware of what she was doing, and her response was to start a special blog to say mean things about me. That's when I realized it was best to ignore her completely. If her imitation had been genuinely due to admiration, no problem. Clearly, the imitation was prompted by something else. This happend several years ago. Today, my first line of action is no action as in ignore the troller.

I don't care if people follow me around and do it often. That's a fan base. It only bugs me when I know they mean me harm.

But you're right. Ignoring them should be our first instinct. And having the reputation of not tolerating nonsense helps as well. I ended up posting this piece a while back, My Definition of a Stalker and noticed some of the spookier people stopped following me around. Maybe they didn't realize their actions were strange. I need to add that AOL quote you used.

Uh, I think I responded to something you wrote yesterday. LOL. Er, I'm not following you. I'm trying to figure out Blogher. You must've hit on something that intrigued me again. *smiles*

"Love is liquid. Be drunkards!" ~~Nordette

How to care for your new troll!

Jennifer Satterwhite — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 18:51:01 -0600

New to having a troll? In light of all of the frenzy, maybe a light bit of tongue in cheek humor on how to handle your new troll can lighten it up a bit and take away some of this new person's power.

Who me? A smart alec? Nevah!

~Jenn~
Mommy Needs Coffee | Mommybloggers
Aggroqueen

Great points on trolls

media girl — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 21:18:37 -0600

I emphatically agree: ignore them, if you can.

We've had our share of trolls, which is to be expected on an opinionated, political, feminist community site. They've almost all been MRAs (men's rights activists). (If you don't know about them, consider yourself blessed.) Often they would start off pretending to be reasonable, but as you engaged them in discussion, they would ignore your points and focus on irrelevancies, and work hard to steer the discussion into their manufactured controversies.

When they would get personal, I would block them. Offensive ad hominem posts often get deleted.

One thing I've done is use the spam filter. Since the trolls have tended to use the same tired talking points, the spam filter "learns" how to identify them, so even if they used different IPs, different email contacts, different names, their posts would get caught. Seeing how their trapped posts would get more and more angry with frustration, I figured that was probably the best way to deal with them: take away their voice.

--
media girl

This is extremely helpful.

CityMama — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 14:32:15 -0600

Thanks for posting this information. (This could be a new post in itself "How to block trolls"...)

Stefania Pomponi Butler
Contributing Editor, Arts & Entertainment, BlogHer

I blog:
CityMama
Kimchi Mamas
Family F

IP Banning

kperfetto — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 11:35:26 -0600

something I hope I never have to do. I have the same problem: the blog stalker. In my case, unless she actually comes out of stalker mode trolls up the joint, she can lurk all she wants. Besides, when you ban an IP address, you're not just banning that one person, right? What if she logs in from work? Or her local library? And what about those IP addresses that change with every log in?

Five Dollar Camera

It's difficult to define

shelleyp — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 08:34:44 -0600

It's difficult to define what is 'troll' behavior. Some of the people who replied mention physical threats and that's traditionally not the behavior of a troll.

Some would say that just disagreeing, or disagreeing passionately with the author is being a troll. For instance, looking at some A listers, Mike Arrington considers anyone who doesn't agree with him to be a troll. Scoble, on the other hand, seems to welcome those cricial. But then I'm biased (she says, tongue in cheek after recent discussions).

Others would say you have to get personal, but when we're discussing something such as embryonic stem cell research, it does get personal. Not to say discussions should be reduced to, "You're a doo doo head", but people are going to feel strongly on the issue and write accordingly. Is this trolling? Or debate?

The author themselves can be a troll, by wording a post in such a way to generate an acrimonious debate. I guess we can ignore such, as authors can ignore commenters.

Re: IP Banning

bobafifi — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 05:14:03 -0600

> Besides, when you ban an IP address,
> you're not just banning that one person, right?

Depends. If they're on a DSL or cable modem connection, chances are that they've got a static IP. In that case you can block the connection by IP (using .htaccess). However, there's a well known company (AOL) that uses a handful of IP addresses for it's gazillion customers. Best to do an IP check to see who owns it before blocking! ;-)

> What if she logs in from work? Or her local library?

Yup - that's a problem, though there might be some recourse by contacting the employer or the library.

> And what about those IP addresses that change with every log in?

If the dynamic IP in question is from a network you don't think anybody but her is using to access your site, you can block the range of the IP by lopping off the last quadrant of the address. For example, if the IP is 12.34.56.78 you'd block 12.34.56. (don't forget the period!)

Hope that helps,

-Bob
bobafifi.com

usedviolins.com

fluteplayer.net

The blogger script doesn't work....:( :(

AmandaM — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 01:17:40 -0600

I would SO love to block a certain stalking IP from my blog. It got so bad that I stopped posting recently, hoping she'd get bored and get out of the habit of checking compulsively on my blog. (I do know who she is, pieced it together and checked in with a website admin. to confirm. Maybe she doesn't realize that I can "see" her every click? And that I know that the anonymous comments are hers? It's not rocket science...geesh...)

I use blogger, so I clicked on the link you provided and read all the way through to the end. The conversation there wraps up with this:

"I guess the instructions for this script aren't very good. I did mention in the first post that it had to interact with the server, but didn't explain what this meant. ...the script must be on an SSI page. In most cases this would be a .shtml page. The only way to do this with a blogspot blog is if you put the pages on a server with another isp. This would allow you to rename the index file to index.shtml. There isn't really any alternative method to block ip addresses. If you are on your own hosting you can do the same with a .htaccess file, which would be a better solution than using a script."

If anyone finds a blogger hack to block IPs, please let me know!

- Amanda M
Imagine Bright Futures

Yes, we are discussing it...

Lisa Stone — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 23:52:36 -0600

And for exactly this reason:

"Writers, artists, creative people are criticized. Their performances are ripped apart. It's part of the territory. Just because our blogs are personal does not mean they're not creative works. This is why I agree with you that shunning is probably the right thing to do. Shun, and write well. Because as M. Kennedy always says, writing well is the best revenge."

You are absolutely right Dorothy -- this post cracks the shunning model. I thought long and hard about writing it, and only did so because I think refusing to feed the trolls is an important, proactive response to this kind of behavior -- but it's hard to do without support. Hopefully reading responses like yours will help people stick to their silence and move on.

And what a story you have -- a stand-out among those I've heard. Nicely handled -- after all that, you're still there!

Lisa Stone
BlogHer Co-founder
Surfette

What do you do when you're cyberstalked, taunted or abused online?

Lisa Stone — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 16:11:10 -0600

Dear women of the Internet:

We need to have a talk. There's a reality of online life that some of us are suffering through by ourselves, a completely normal but painful experience that every woman I've ever met who goes online has had -- and that plenty of men have had too.

I'm talking about the lovely experience of encountering Internet trolls. And for me, it all boils down to this...

Sometimes people are mean in this virtual Web world. Really mean.

And it's my opinion that there's only one solution: Ignore them.

That's the most powerful thing you can do.

I'm saying shun them, like the Amish, as a friend recently recommended to me via email. This is our virtual world -- we created it. The most powerful thing we can do when we encounter a person who is abusive online is to refuse to acknowledge them. Deprived of the spotlight, their own hateful little lights will blink out.

Buh-bye!

Don't link them, don't talk about them, don't read them. As far as we're concerned, they don't exist. And amongst ourselves, I think it's time to bring the issue out of the closet, demystify it, circle our wagons and learn to roll our eyes about it together, even laugh at it. Who cares?

I can imagine some of your faces -- you're thinking that I don't understand. You're wrong. I already know how hard it is and I do understand. Believez-moi.

If you're lucky, you may not yet have learned that people exist who will use the Internet to come to our blogs or sites and belittle us, call our names and poke fun at us, our beliefs, our races, our religions, the fact that we are women or men or other, perhaps even our kids or our dogs or our sans-serif fonts, for crying out loud. In fact, if we have the nerve to be female, especially someone who is not white, we will attract more mean, hate-filled people than folks who are not female and white. Some of these people even (inexplicably) have enough time and interest in us to start their own blogs and sites to showcase their abuse of us.

Ridiculous, isn't it? You may wonder to yourself, how is it that there can be a war on in Iraq, children starving on the streets of every nation on this rock and the unfolding horror that is Darfur -- and some people have time to spend hours bullying other people online?

Here's how: It's not about us. It's about them. That's why ignoring trolls works.

Please read that last sentence again? Now print it, cut it out, chew it up and swallow it. This is my mantra: It's. Not. About. Me. That's why I refuse to play.

Here's a little perspective that helped me: As Timothy Campbell, who wrote this great article for AOL users in 2001, said: "Trolls crave attention, and they care not whether it is positive or negative. They see the Internet as a mirror into which they can gaze in narcissistic rapture. If you want a deeper analysis than that, perhaps a psychologist can shed some additional light on the matter."

In order to take our revenge, our best bet is "don't respond, don't interact and don't engage," recommends the UK National Workplace Bullying Advice Line:

"Many serial bullies are also serial attention-seekers. More than anything else they want attention. It doesn't matter what type of attention they get, positive or negative, as long as they can provoke someone into paying them attention. It's like a 2-year-old child throwing a tantrum to get attention from a parent. The best way to treat bullies is to refuse to respond and to refuse to engage them - which they really hate. In other words, do not reply to their postings, and on forums carry on posting without reference to their postings as if they didn't exist. In other words, treat nobodies as nobodies."

Gina Trapani of Lifehacker puts it yet another way:

"But when YOU are the target of an insulting post or sharply-worded email, quite frankly, it can really suck. Today I've got some strategies for dealing with Internet Meanies: those faceless virtual bullies who take pleasure in shooting other people down from the safety of their keyboards....It's easy to take out frustrations on someone online because they don't quite feel real. Talking smack puts people in a position of power, one they want to be in because they feel small and weak in other areas of their lives. The key words here are "small" and "weak." "

Today, fortunately, the law and corporate policies have evolved to the point where we can take action in certain circumstances. Specifically:

Currently there are 45 cyberstalking (and related) U.S. federal and state laws on the books, as well as laws in U.K. and India. Read about them here at Jayne Hitchcock's site, Working to Halt Online Abuse (WHOA): http://www.haltabuse.org/resources/laws/index.shtml

If you need information on child-related laws, WHOA suggests you visit Safetyed

Get their IP addresses from your logs and ban them from your blog. That's what Jenna Hatfield did. She writes:

"what do you do when mocking, name-calling, insulting, ignoring and cussing donâ€™t work? What do you do when youâ€™ve got a persistent little bugger that annoys the bejeebus out of you, sucks up your bandwidth, steals photos and takes things out of context to their own personal spaces? I wasnâ€™t sure this morning. I now know how!"

Check out Jenna's post to ban IP addresses if you host your own site. Here's how to ban an IP address on: Typepad, WordPress (Update: see Sassy's comments below about taking care with this host), Movable Type and Blogger (I don't know for certain about this last link, but it's the best I could find)

So - there you have it. That's my approach to online life.

What do you think?

Image credit: Family Living, Hatfield Style

Lisa Stone
BlogHer Co-founder
Surfette