Finding Supportive Cyber Communities

In preparing for online harassment, find and establish a supportive cyber community of friends, colleagues, and digital allies who can come to your aid—and whom you can support—during episodes of online harassment.

The following information is specific to creating online communities, which may overlap with other social networks in your life, but can serve as a potential pool of first responders to rely upon when online abuse escalates or goes public.

1. Locate your people.

If you’re active on social media, chances are you already belong to one or more conversation threads, Facebook groups, or online forums dedicated to the topics and issues you care and write about. These curated social networks are crucial communities to tap into if you’re attacked online, or if you want to support others targeted by online harassment.

If you’re not very active on social media or in chat rooms but wish to find a community of writers or other individuals online, start with your real-world connections. Send a group text to your writer friends or an email to the professional, editorial, and/or alumni groups you’re a part of and ask if they belong to any online communities looking for new members.

And if all else fails . . . start your own online group! Writers’ and journalists’ lives are rich with connections worth bringing into online spaces. Potential networking veins to mine include:

• Any publication that’s ever published your work, online or off.
• Professed fans and/or followers of your work.
• Editors, copy editors, and researchers you may have worked with in the past.
• Former classmates if you graduated from a journalism school, a writing program, or an MFA program.
• Former members of a writing workshop you attended.
• A list of attendees with whom you networked at a recent writing conference.
• Any identity-specific group you belong to – that shares a religious, ethnic, cultural, political, physical, sexual, ideological, or other identifying characteristic important to you.

2. Post a note to the group on the subject of online harassment.

It’s important that online communities talk about and acknowledge the implications of online harassment before it begins. If you trust a particular online group, or at least a few of its key members, to have your back the next time you’re attacked online, don’t be afraid to post a message containing the following information:

• An explicit acknowledgement that online harassment exists and is incredibly problematic for productive online dialogue in any online forum.
• A brief anecdote about how online harassment has impacted you personally, to help personalize and narrativize the issue (only if you’re comfortable sharing this information; not everyone will be, and that’s fine).
• A call to action to the group. This could be a general request for a pledge from group members to maintain the community as a harassment-free space. Or you could publish a more specific request asking people to pledge their allyship to anyone in the group who asks for help or intervention during an episode of online harassment.
• A request to collect contact information from anyone who wishes to be on a direct mailing list. This step is more sensitive, as many people will have good reasons for not wanting to hand over their personal contact information, especially to someone they don’t know very well. (This is, after all, part of the appeal of joining online communities in the first place.) But if there are people in the group with whom you have trusted relationships offline, or if the group members know and trust each other, sharing contact information can expedite the intervention process during an episode of online harassment.

3. Create a separate place where members of your community can be easily reached in a time of crisis.

This could be a private Facebook group, an email distribution list, a Whatsapp chain, etc. In some cases, you might want to draft a note in advance to fire off when your writing is published and/or the harassment begins.

Example of a crisis note: “SOS—Publishing an article about Finnish politics today. Last time I published on this topic, I received major hate on Twitter (people doxing my home address and calling me racial slurs). Can anyone get on the article’s comments section at 12pm EST and write something positive to help set the tone of the thread? You don’t have to agree with what I write, but anything written in a respectful tone without hateful language will help!”