What are your options if you’re being harassed online?

By Ginella Massa

What recourse do you have if you’re the victim of cyber harassment? According to one legal expert, even with policies and legislation, getting justice isn’t always easy.

“It can be a game of whack-a-mole,” says internet Lawyer Gil Zvuloney. “Usually if you flag [a comment] as inappropriate, behind the scenes it gets processed and it may get removed. But that doesn’t solve the problem if there are so many comments and you delete one comment and another five pop up.”

That’s what one Toronto woman says she has been dealing with for the last three years after a video of her shouting and swearing at a group of men’s rights protestors was posted online. “In the first 12 hours of this video going up, I had 500 hateful threatening messages in my inbox,” she told CityNews, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In an email, YouTube told the woman, “We are unable to identify a violation of our Privacy Guidelines,” adding, “We would encourage you to try to resolve any issues directly with the creator of the content in question.”

Zvuloney says victims of online harassment can, and should, report threatening messages to police, but it’s up to police to decide if threats are credible. He says prosecution can also be further complicated if threats are coming from outside the country. “If a neighbour said ‘you deserve to be raped,’ that might be more of a credible threat than the person in Australia saying ‘I’m going to come and kill you.’ So it really depends on the circumstances, it depends on the context that the threat is being made.”

The woman in the video says she did reach out to police about the massive amount of hateful messages she has received, but in an email, police told her moving forward with prosecution wasn’t “realistic”.

But Zvulony says there are other options, including civil litigation, or even sending a letter from a lawyer directly to a perpetrator threatening legal action. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution,” he says. “There are a lot of legal avenues one can take, none of them are cheap, none of them are all-encompassing, so it’s a big problem.”

 

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