With 200,000,000 registered twitter accounts and almost 450,000 new accounts being created daily, some of you are bound to run into a sociopath, a bully a troll, even a complete cyberstalking psychopath on Twitter sooner or later. Having just had to deal with my own little unpleasant experience with a small group of possibly psychotic individuals targeting friends on the twitternets, I thought I should share with you a little video that my friends at Tweetreports (@tweetreports on Twitter) cooked up for us just for this post.
For tips on how to deal with or report harassment or cyberstalking on Twitter, check out Twitter’s Abusive Users page (click here). The page is filled with information, tips, links and resources that should help you no matter what your situation may be, so no need to republish it here.
The video I have for you today shows you step-by-step how to capture incidences of online harassment, bullying and cyber-stalking for later use – as evidence in a court case, for example. Though Tweetreports is typically used for brand and keyword monitoring, SEO research, tagged bookmarking and other business-focused activities on Twitter, it lends itself quite well to this use as well. Here’s how it works:
If the above video doesn’t play for you, go watch it here.
If you know someone who is dealing with cyberstalkers, online bullying, digital harassment or any other type of abuse being channeled through Twitter, please share this post with them. And if you aren’t dealing with anything like that right now, bookmark this for future use. You never can tell when it might suddenly come in handy for you or someone you know.
Other handy resources just in case:
NCSL’s 2011 overview of state statutes regarding cyberstalking, cyberharassment and cyberbullying.
NCSL’s online child protection page.
IJCC’s Analysis of Online Harassment and Intimidation report.
The National Center for Victims of Crime website.
If you don’t live in the United States, a quick search should identify similar resources for the country in which you live.
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Speaking of kids… Cyberbullying infographic (below) courtesy of ZoneAlarm.com.
Also follow this story on how cyber-bullying may have led to 14 year old Jamey Rodenmeyer’s suicide. Let’s make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.
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Bonus Twitter stats infographic (below) courtesy of the Touch Agency. Follow them on Twitter: @touchagency.
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If you haven’t done so already, check out a free chapter of Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization on the smroi.net website. The book, which outlines for businesses and organizations how to design, implement, manage and measure social media programs that are inherently connected to relevant business objectives, is available at booksellers everywhere.
Brand Building and Online Marketing Blog 
Wow – where was this post when I had to deal with a troll several months ago?!? You have no idea how many people will be able to find help from this post, Olivier. I have witnessed a respectable association colleague be ripped apart by someone on Twitter using a pseudonym who was giving out details of this woman’s education, resume, and work experience and attacking the veracity of them while tweeting sporadic scriptures from the Bible about people receiving their just desserts. Scary stuff.
Yeah, sorry. Like with many unpleasant things, you don’t really focus on them until they happen to you. Usually, people get nasty for a day and vanish. It just isn’t worth the trouble to get on my bad side (plenty of easier victims to focus on), but a few weirdos decided that they were safe to do and say whatever they wanted as long as they and I were separated by the safety layer of the interwebs. It took them almost a week to finally move on. Meanwhile, I am now finding out that several of my peers are living with cyberharassment on a daily basis, and have for months (in some cases even years). I can’t imagine how draining that must be.
I should have done a piece on this a while ago. Better late than never?
Thanks for working to bring attention to a cause that desperately needs it! I leave you this to think about though. The difference between cyberbullying and cyberstalking is basically age. Society calls it bullying when it is children, but it is the same acts that as adults we call cyberstalking (when the behavior is ongoing).
I have been the victim of cyberstalking and worked with many of its victims as well (via Jodi’s Voice). It is an unsettling (to say the least) feeling to not know what will come next. Thanks for offering helpful tips and solutions!
Can we have a copy for FB Users too, I did share. TQ!
I wonder if the tweets are still available in maybe a twitter archive for later evidence retrieval?
That’s kind of tricky. 1. Tweets don’t last forever. 2. Searching for them becomes increasingly difficult with every passing day. Best to capture the discussion as quickly as possible.
You can find old tweets on http://www.snapbird.org. Creepy, but true.
Thanks for the information Olivier. Sadly, this can be a problem.
As someone who takes and interest in the 1st Amendment, I find it annoying and troublesome that people are turning to the courts to monitor the social media playground of 1st Amendment protected speech. If someone tweets “your a dick” 10k times, and your offended or “harassed” you have the option of getting off Twitter. No one is chaining you to any users “soapbox” That is not to say that people should not utilize the courts to deal with true threats, defamation etc which are NOT protected under the 1st Amendment but the courts should not be arbiters of annoyance, personal offense, and hurt feelings.
Voicing your opinion and harassing someone are not the same.
I have a friend on twitter right now who is being harassed, defamed, her family has been contacted, her personal info has been posted, address, phone, occupation, full name. Why should she leave twitter because a group of bullies are challenged in the social department? IE, bored. They’re breaking the law. She’s done nothing wrong! Why should the victim of such harassment be imprisoned while her attackers move on to the next guy. Which happens to be any and every person who tweets, or defends the woman. I recently contacted Law enforcement due to slanderous comments they’re posting about me. This group of 5-8 have victimized one person after another for the last year. Two of them have had their ips suspended from twitter. They’re back using a proxy. I feel I had no choice but to contact LE. These women have several blogs on wordpress dedicated to defaming several of our names. They have searched, and posted our real names along with lies about our personal lives. They’ve given no thought to our personal lives or what effect their lies could potentially have. I have documented everything. I do NOT take someone online invading my personal life lightly, no one should. I will not stop until they’re all held accountable.
Thank you so much got writing this blog. Very helpful!
Hello Mr. Olivier,
We here at AdAsia 2011 (Asia’s biggest marketing, media, management and communication event) would like to take this opportunity and invite you to write a post for our blog (http://blog.adasia2011.com). Our theme this year is ‘Uncertainty: The New Certainty’ and would appreciate if you could write a post surrounding our theme. Mail us your entry at adasia2011gmail .com and we would be happy to put it up on our Blog.
Tanks & Regards
AdAsia 2011 Team
This is great, Oliver, thanks for pulling it all together. Schools should all get a copy of this and I will forward it to my son’s school today.
Thank you for writing this – at the moment there is a group of around 12 women – fans of a “Reality ” show that are doing this to me on a daily basis –
I should sign this hopeless
I like the detail in your blog. 🙂
There’s always some fool that has to add their 4cents to any debate.
Eg. There’s a group on facebook that has 60 000 fans. People of all ages, races, cultures comment on real-time status updates and comments.
Some people just feel like expressing themselves in a negative way – just to upset sensitive people, or create noise.
Sometimes, the easiest option , if you’re administrator of the fan-page is to BLOCK the noise asap – but if you do annoy someone you’ve blocked – they can always set up a new profile and cause more problems for you.
Guess – you can’t win all the battles.
Great post, Olivier. I’m sorry that you had to deal with this as a first-hand experience. Growing up in the era I did, I have seen and experienced first-hand how juvenile bullying can transfer over to the digital realm. While it isn’t exactly excusable in kids, it’s easier to understand…when adults get into it, though, it just seems………………dumb.
(I type about six different words in lieu of “dumb” and none of them really seemed to fit.)
Thanks for offering these resources. Unfortunately, you’re right in saying that most heavy users will probably have to deal with this personally someday. I’ll be sure to forward this post to anyone who happens to run into this problem.
Good post, Olivier. Have you ever encountered cyberharassment as a form of hypercompetitiveness… i.e. something that is more than the expected level of competition, and borderline personal vendetta? I have, from someone in a space where there should be plenty of room for everyone, more than enough opportunity for collaboration. It’s a subtle form of harassment because it isn’t as clear-cut as other examples, but it’s definitely aimed at “enemies” because some people just gotta be #1. (Think “extreme pageant moms”… not illegal actions but not normal either. I suspect mental illness.) In any case, thanks for this; I will share with a friend who specializes in this area.
Not really. I mean, conversations can get pretty heated (as they did with the whole ISMA debacle), and I had one guy threaten to beat me up after I dared criticize Amy-Jo Martin’s ridiculous ROI equation filled with “cold” and “warm” metrics, but no. I don’t consider that harassment.
I’ve only experienced it around the death of Trey Pennington this fall. A group of really weird attorneys started harassing me here and on Twitter. It was particularly difficult to deal with because of how distraught I was over Trey’s passing, which is why they targeted me, I think. (And targeted others, for that matter.) They found an opportunity to beat the crap out of someone, and they took it. As soon as I had really had enough, they moved on to some other unfortunate soul.
These guys are basically trolls: They live to make people’s lives miserable on the internet. i still monitor them regularly, and it’s all they do. They find someone’s weak point and gang up on them. Then they get bored and move on. It’s pretty sick. I’m no shrink, but I imagine they would probably be diagnosed as sociopaths.
I don’t think it would have taken more than a couple of hours to put an end to what you are talking about.
I don’t consider heated conversations harassment either — it is (or should be) discourse that leads to improvement. No, what I was referring to is much closer to, yet more subtle than, what you went through with the attorneys. It likewise involves finding and hitting at a perceived weak point… which to some extent is what all healthy competition does, but this has never felt like healthy competition.
I am sure you’re right about it taking only a few hours to put an end to, but when it was at its worst, I wasn’t in a strong enough emotional position to take it head-on the way you do. And I’m still not certain that it’s not better for me simply to focus on excelling at what I do, rather than getting sucked into a(nother) negative dynamic.
I believe it determines how severe the written `trolling’ effect it has on its victims. I’ll gladly sue just to punish some idiot that think it’s cool to belittle others , because they hide behind their computer screen.
Even if someone might not seem to have feelings – they’re human – each person has feelings. These trolls must be eliminated.
While is a very useful tool in documenting harassment, let’s not forget that it can also be misused. IE Fake accounts made to accuse innocent people of wrong doings.
IE Ada, who posted in the comment section omitted that she’s called people at home, posted children’s photos, names, addresses.
I think there are 2 sides to the ‘harassment’ argument and it should go on a case by case basis. Like if there’s a woman who is mentally unsound who makes accusations because she thrives on chaos.
Great article thanks. I would add that anyone bullying someone should be reported to their ISP for a ‘code of conduct violation’.
Hi all, can anyone help or offer advice?
I am being harassed by someone on twitter, not a troll over some debate but someone who is actually targeting me and trying to humiliate. They have made fake accounts impersonating me, stealing my picture and launching a tirade of abuse, making sure to @mention me so that I am not able to ignore it. Every time i report a fake account, they create another one letting me know their conditions if i want this abuse to stop. I feel unsafe, threatened and anxious, as well as other feelings i cant even describe.
I don’t feel like anyone would take me seriously, especially if i reported it to the police as this is online harassment.
I have taken screen shots of the fake accounts and abusive tweets, this person seems intent on ‘ruining me.’
Any advice on what i could do next would be much appreciated. thanks.
Reblogged this on Andreaurbanfox © and commented:
This blog might help people, who like me, are being cyberstalked & harassed.
All the pointers here are very helpful and some I already knew from my local law enforcement officer.