A couple of dozen students, faculty, academic researchers, and communications professionals, including participants from as far away as Finland, spent an hour and a half one morning earlier this week discussing ways to avoid the trauma that can accompany anti-social behaviour on social media.

This anti-social social media can take many forms and its grotesque tentacles can cause much damage, including the suppression of information from university researchers.

“It’s made some people in academia decide to not talk about their work online,” Jaigris Hodson, a Royal Roads associate professor, who hosted the workshop, tells Capital Daily.

They’ll obviously need more than a 90-minute window to cure the ails of the internet—and similar gatherings are likely in the cards, so they’re expecting to have more of these workshops at Royal Roads, which just speaks to the ongoing clash between academics and keyboard warriors. 

“I think there’s a lack of knowledge, Hodson says. “So, it’s like ‘it’s finally happened to me, what do I do now?’”‍

One in three Canadians has or will be bullied on social media‍

The online workshop, out of Royal Roads, comes on the heels of a report entitled The State of Anti-Social Behaviour on Social Media, which finds one in three Canadians has or will experience some form of anti-social behaviour or bullying, on social media.

"Anti-social behaviour is so normalized in our online spaces today," said Anatoliy Gruzd, a professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto Metropolitan University, and one of the authors of the report which was conducted by the university’s Social Media Lab, where he is director of research.

"Left unattended, the normalization of certain types of aggressive anti-social behaviour, such as hate speech, can erode public trust and confidence in democracy itself,” he said.

Last week’s workshop shone the spotlight on researchers in academia, who often go online with their findings, only to find keyboard warriors can be less than kind.

“The reason why we focussed on researchers to start [with the seminar] is because misinformation has been a huge problem,” says Hodson, who is also a Canada Research Chair in digital communication for the public interest.

“We’ve targeted these workshops at researchers to make sure that harassment isn’t impeding the ability for them to get evidence-based information out to the public when they need it.”

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In 2017, when Hodson began asking academics about online bullying she started hearing horror stories. And she says it’s only gotten worse.

“Is it because they’re online more, or is it because, you know, people have been emboldened to be worse online?” Hodson wonders. 

“Again, we don’t know for sure what the causes are, but we do know through talking to people that these things have been getting worse,” she surmises. 

Hodson and an academic partner were bullied at the beginning of the pandemic

Hodson recalls in February 2020, when she and an academic partner received a grant to study misinformation in the early days of the pandemic. 

She says even though this was at the supportive stage when everyone was banging pots and pans for health-care workers on the front end of the emerging battle against COVID-19, the reaction often was toxic.

“He received a threatening email after the grant was announced, you know, saying ‘You’re working for Justin Trudeau and you’re a disgrace to your people and you better give the money back right now.’ It was extremely bizarre.”

And this was early on, well before the testy discussion about vaccines. “We were really shaken up by that.”

Everybody loses, not just the immediate victim

Hodson would argue such experiences not only can be traumatizing personally, but they also can be bad news for democracy because this anti-social behaviour can bully academics to the sidelines in perpetual fear of publishing their work.

“And what a loss, right?” she says. “What a loss for Canadian taxpayers who fund a lot of this research through their tax dollars. It’s a loss to the public discourse because we can’t have  conversations about this work if it’s not there.” 

Hodson points to a PEW study released in 2021, which found four in 10 Americans experience online harassment.

She says with academics, often it’s political, with people threatening to call the dean to have the academic fired.

“From 2014 to 2020, the lines are going up for physical threats, stalking, name harassment, sexual harassment, even less severe forms, like name-calling, purposeful harassment.”

She says when people don’t want to hear what others have to say, sometimes harassment is used as a tool to try to silence the researchers who are talking about their work. But sometimes it’s just personal.

“If somebody doesn’t feel that you should have the authority to speak, they may lash out by harassing you online,” she says. 

“Some people do it kind of recreationally, they do it for the lols because they're bored.”

Some academics receive threats that have to be taken to the police because they’ve revealed a place of residence, or worse, have threatened to commit bodily harm.

“It can be quite distressing to read every single negative message about yourself,” Hodson tells Capital Daily. “Women tend to get things like rape threats, and that can be very distressing.”

Note the aggressor, report the aggressor, block the aggressor

One way to try to avoid any potential trauma is to have colleagues screen your social media site, noting any ugly response, recording it with a screenshot, and reporting it—to the platform itself, and to the person’s supervisor. And of course, the sender of the offensive post should be blocked. 

Hodson says the backing of the employer is paramount so they can provide access to mental-health care, IT support, and whatever else may be necessary.

There’s also the dimension of what Hodson refers to as bystander intervention. 

“If you see something, step in, send positive messages to the person to outweigh the negative, and again, block and report.”

Hodson says you can’t do anything about “randoms on the internet”, but you can protect yourself and your colleagues when harassment occurs. 

“If a person feels supported, they’ll be able to recover much more effectively than somebody who feels they’re alone against this sometimes wave of harassment.” 

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