Digital Smarts - Defining Online Harassment: Everyone Has A Different Idea

According to a new Pew Research Center survey, defining online harassment is just as complicated for the average American user as it is for huge social media companies — and the line on what is and isn’t harassment gets even more fuzzy when gender or race come into the picture. The survey polled 4,151 respondents on various scenarios and asked them whether each one crossed the threshold for online harassment. For example in one scenario, people had widely varying opinions on when the harassment begins between two friends whose online disagreement becomes public, with one friend eventually being threatened by uninvolved third parties.

Men and women also widely disagreed on when an issue online became sexual harassment for a woman whose post is shared by a popular blogger resulting in her receiving vulgar messages, threats and having her photo edited to include sexual imagery. Men, by a wide margin, didn’t find that to be harassment versus the vast majority of women who did. And even when 82% of respondents found messages in one scenario to include racial slurs and harassing insults, only 57 percent thought the social media platform should step in.

These results show that there are roadblocks in addressing the issue of online harassment when people often have trouble agreeing on what qualifies as harassment in the first place, especially when women or minorities are involved. It also paints a troubling picture where even when people do define behavior as harassment, many still hesitate to hold the offenders accountable for it. This lack of agreement on when the social media platform or others should step in seemingly has troubling implications for those who are cyberbullied and how the matter should be handled.