Thursday, February 12, 2009

Character Assassination and online harassment: How to protect yourself

So about a year and a half ago, I made the mistake of dating someone I shouldn't have.  After we broke up about 3 months later, he has since harassed me on the phone, via text, created fake accounts on YouTube, and email.  I am hoping this will help someone else deal with at least *some* of online harassment/defamation.

1.) If the person has created a harassing/slanderous site, more than likely it should fall under the hosting provider/domain name providers anti-harassment/anti-defamation policy. If you have the web address, do a "Whois" search on the domain name in question (domain name is in the format: domainname.com or domainname.net or domainname.org etc, without trailing characters. This will get the host/domain providers contact information.

http://ws.arin.net/whois

Enter the domain name in question in that form at the top of the page and click "submit". This will bring you back the companies hosting the site and where the domain name was registered. You can contact them directly and they should suspend their account immediately for free.

2.) If the person is using a Yahoo, Hotmail, or other free email service, you can report them via an abuse page the site should have.
For Yahoo!: http://abuse.yahoo.com
For Hotmail: http://hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/dasp/ua_info.asp email: abuse@hotmail.com

3.) If they are using a forum/board, you can contact the site owner directly and have the moderator take the offending message down.

4.) For social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, there should be a "Report" or "Flag as Inappropriate".  Someone from the site's security should email you back regarding the user and their account may be suspended.

5.) File a police report.  Electronic communication harassment and cyber-stalking is real.  Protect yourself legally...

I hope this helps someone else, I had to learn this stuff the hard way - hopefully, you won't have to.  Victims of cyber bullying shouldn't have to hide to feel safe from cyber bullies.  If they can do it from behind a keyboard, what's to say they won't act on it in person...

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