In recent years, thousands of university faculty, staff, and students have been targeted with networked harassment, especially groups under-represented in higher education. In this form of harassment, a network of actors organize to remove scholars from public discourse by causing psychological, physical, and organizational harm (Marwick, 2021). Prior social science research on networked harassment has focused on the experience of individuals and short-term incidents (Veletsianos et al., 2018) rather than institutional vulnerabilities to harassment campaigns that can stretch for months or years (Marwick, 2021). Even though online threats are increasingly interconnected and coordinated, more is needed to know about the relationships between responsible academic institutions, their current prevention mechanisms, and the effectiveness of their responses. To investigate the relationship between the targets of harassment and their organizations, this study starts by looking at public media to create a U.S.-based dataset on networked harassment of scholars from 2016 through 2022. To do so, we are datamining the Media Cloud archive of news reports for cases of networked harassment that escalated to coverage in the news media. By performing a content analysis in the queried news articles, we record common characteristics of harassment cases, including the nature, duration, outcomes, and institutions involved. There's a need for greater discussion and coordination among academic institutions to protect their workers. Given how academic prestige is becoming intertwined, in part, with maintaining an online presence to make oneself discoverable in digital mediums, preventing harassment is increasingly "part of the job."

Online harassment is a public health concern, and social media algorithms are often proposed as a solution by social media companies. As online harassment grows, there are concerns that algorithms as content moderators fail to achieve their desired effect because of inabilities to contextualize social issues. This research contributes to the intersection of algorithms and online harassment by investigating the algorithmic folk theories of the victims, perpetrators, and bystanders of online harassment. Strategically sampling the experiences of marginalized identity categories who experienced harassment, we conducted grounded theory interviews and found that people theorize that algorithmic failures fuel online harassment and isolate victims. We describe four folk theories that victims, perpetrators, and witnesses utilize to make sense of their experiences of online harassment. The critical mass intervention theory asserts algorithms only pay attention to harassment incidents with a large number of flags. The harassment amplifier theory describes perceptions of how algorithms amplify harassment content to increase engagement. The algorithmic virus theory refers to perceptions that algorithms seek to form new audiences for content, which networks harassers together. The biased protection theory finds victims perceive that algorithms fail to contextualize the harassment of marginalized communities. Victims, bystanders, and perpetrators each described using their folk theories to instigate, push back, or succumb to the culture of online harassment. Understanding these algorithmic online harassment folk theories highlights how social media algorithms perpetuate harassment and fail to support victims.

Keywords: algorithmic folk theories, online harassment, networked harassment, social media, content moderation.

Stories about the impacts of online research harassment on graduate students are rarely acknowledged or gathered. Students are left alone to carry the burden of having their research derailed by a barrage of constant hatred and became yet another decontextualized statistic regarding Ph.D. completion rates. Even as aggression and toxicity increasingly proliferate on social media platforms the personal experiences of graduate students who have encountered hate while conducting or sharing their research online remain untold and uncounted.

We will present the process and artistic outputs of research creation project Bearing Witness, that begins to gather and share stories of research harassment, to bring visibility to the issue.

Our project has three components that we will present.

1: Storytelling. We captured the stories from graduate students who have experienced online hate and harassment in response to sharing their research in public forums.

2: Creative Interpretation and Illumination

We have commissioned three graduate student artists to use the transcripts from these stories as a material source to create three individual pieces that capture these student’s experiences. The artists were commissioned with explicit goal of rendering and making visible the stories of harassment experienced by graduate students.

3: Exhibition and Amplification

The final creative works will be exhibited on York University campus during the 2023 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (May 27-June 2), an event expected to draw approximately 8,000 scholars and students. We will have an opportunity for visitors to comment on the exhibit.

In October 2017, Raya Sarkar, a 24-year-old law student from India, posted a crowdsourced list on Facebook of male Indian academics who allegedly harassed women. This led to the start of the #MeToo revolution in India, where universities became key spaces of discussion, debate and activism. Due to failures of both the criminal justice system and the described capitalist, patriarchal, casteist structures of Indian academia, hundreds of survivors who had experienced sexual violence at universities came forward online, disclosing their stories of harassment and abuse. Drawing from interviews with seven sexual violence survivors who disclosed their experiences online, this paper provides insight into reasons why survivors choose to bypass formal reporting mechanisms in HEIs, and instead turn to online spaces in their search for justice and healing. We argue that students are wary of university processes and often seek alternative forms of justice beyond the ‘punishment’ that HEIs are often unable or unwilling to provide. As such, this article provides compelling empirical evidence of the urgent need for universities to adopt survivor-centred approaches in their processes and conceptualization of justice, as well as how online spaces enable healing, catharsis and new means of informal justice.