George Veletsianos, PhD

Category: harassment

Online workshop: What Can Researchers and Research Communicators Do to Address Online Abuse?,

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On November 8, 2023

In harassment

Please consider the following invitation

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If you have been subjected to online harassment as a result of discussing your work online, you might be interested in a virtual workshop being put on by researchers at Royal Roads University, Toronto Metropolitan University, and the University of British Columbia.

The online workshop, titled What Can Researchers and Research Communicators Do to Address Online Abuse?, happens November 23 from 10 to 11:30 a.m. PST. It’s specifically designed to support researchers and research communicators, but it’s open to everyone.

The workshop covers scenarios and strategies to protect yourself online, including how to limit the amount of data you expose online.

“None of us should have to deal with this alone,” Hodson says, adding that she and her team have met so many just doing that over the course of their research.

“I think people don’t realize that we could be a community. I think one of the broader goals for this and our work going forward is to help people recognize that they’re not alone and we really are stronger together.”

Learn more about the workshop and register now.

Workshop facilitators

Anatoliy Gruzd, Canada Research Chair in Privacy Preserving Digital Technologies, Toronto Metropolitan University

Anatoliy Gruzd is a Canada Research Chair in Privacy-Preserving Digital Technologies, a professor at the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management and the Director of Research at the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is also a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, and a founding co-chair of the International Conference on Social Media and Society. The broad aim of Gruzd’s various research initiatives is to understand how social media data can be used ethically to tackle a wide variety of societal problems from combating disinformation to helping educators navigate social media for teaching and learning.

Jaigris Hodson, Canada Research Chair in Digital Communication for the Public Interest, Royal Roads University.

Jaigris Hodson is a Canada Research Chair in Digital Communication for the Public Interest. She has published research in a wide range of academic publications and presented her work to national and international audiences. She has also published in non-academic publications such as The Evolllution and spoke at TEDX Victoria 2012. She is currently working on several SSHRC funded grant projects related to online harassment, anti social online behavior and digital misinformation. She is also a founding member of the Digital Public Interest Collective

Chris Tenove, Interim Director in the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, University of British Columbia

Chris Tenove is the interim director of the University of British Columbia’s Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions (CSDI), and a researcher and instructor in the School of Public Policy & Global Affairs. He has published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the challenges that digital media pose to democracy and human rights, focusing on topics such as electoral disinformation, social media regulation, and online harassment of politicians and health communicators. His policy reports on these topics include Trolled on the Campaign Trail: Online Incivility and Abuse in Canadian Politics (2020), Online Hate in the Pandemic (2022), and Not Just Words: How Reputational Attacks Harm Journalists and Undermine Press Freedom (2023). Prior to obtaining a PhD in Political Science, he worked in Canada and internationally as an award-winning journalist.

Victoria O’Meara, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher and co-Founder of the Digital Public Interest Collective

Victoria O’Meara is a post-doctoral researcher at Royal Roads University in the College of Interdisciplinary Studies. She received her PhD in Media Studies from Western University. Her research draws from critical political economy and intersectional feminism to examine issues related to work, technology, reputation, and influence in the digital media economy.

Three ways in which universities are unprepared to support faculty targeted by online harassment

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On July 14, 2023

In harassment

Continuing our research into the technology-facilitated harassment and abuse that faculty members face, colleagues and I recently turned our attention to institutional policies and interviews with academic leaders to understand the ways in which institutions are (un)prepared to deal with faculty harassment. We published our results in Higher Education (which is a journal that I’ve been meaning to publish in for a while), and identified three areas of unpreparedness:

  • first, institutions focus on physical safety over non-contact harms (issue: the harms are numerous and multidimensional);
  • second, they envision perpetrators to be named, local, and part of the campus community (issue: anonymous harassment);
  • third, the reporting process is cumbersome and outpaced by the speed and frequency with which TFVA occurs.

These findings suggest areas for policy improvement and expanding academic leaders’ knowledge around the harassment that their faculty face.

You can find this paper here: Gosse, C., O’Meara, V., Hodson, J., & Veletsianos, G. (in press). Too rigid, too big, too slow: Institutional readiness to protect and support faculty from technology facilitated violence and abuse. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01043-7  or preprint (pdf).

Who supports scholars who receive online harassment and how effective are those supports?

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On April 7, 2021

In harassment, my research

“Imagine you publish a paper detailing the results of research you spent two years working on. You are excited and decide to share your work on social media, both so people can hear about it, and also because you know your university has a public scholarship strategy in place that encourages doing so. Within hours, however, the abuse pours onto your post. First you are told your research is wrong or useless, and you are surprised at the negative attention given the innocuous subject of your work. But soon it snowballs into something worse, with users descending into more aggressive harassment and even threatening violence against you and your family. Distressed, eventually you pull the post, unwilling to tolerate the vitriol, feeling defeated and diminished. You weren’t prepared for such an outcome, and you aren’t entirely sure what to do next.”

The quote is from the introduction of our latest paper on the harassment that scholars experience. The paper asks: What coping and support mechanisms – other than deleting post – do scholars use? Where does that support come from? Does it come from friends and family? University? The legal system? How effective are those supports perceived to be?

This is our fourth harassment-focused paper (see first, second, and third). Using data from 182 survey participants,  we identified gaps in the support that scholars receive when they face harassment. We identified lack of support at the university level (administration and colleagues) and at the level of digital platforms. We also noted that attitudes and values about gender, race, academic work, and online life worsen the problem, as some scholars noted that they refrained from speaking about “controversial topics” online (i.e. a chilling silencing effect), and also that they often “felt responsible” for the harassment directed at them. The table below summarizes some of these findings

You can access the paper from the link below. If you don’t have library access, here is the author’s copy of the submitted paper.

Houlden, S., Hodson, J., Veletsianos, G., Gosse, C., Lowenthal, P., Dousay, T., & Hall, N., (in press). Support for Scholars Coping with Online Harassment: An Ecological Framework. Feminist Media Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1883086

Women scholars’ experiences with online harassment and abuse

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On January 30, 2019

In harassment, my research, scholarship

For the last year or so, my colleagues and I have been working on a SSHRC-funded project examining the experiences of harassment that women academics face online. “We” refers to my colleagues Jaigris Hodson, and our two amazing research assistants Chandell Gosse and Shandell Houlden. We’re now at a point where we will start sharing artifacts from this work more and more broadly, including a wesbsite, scenario-based simulations, webinars, and, in due course, cc-licensed pedagogical materials to lead workshops on understanding and responding to online harassment.

Our first two papers sought to understand the experience of online harassment: what does it do? how do women cope with it? what supports do they use to respond to it?

These two papers are available below.

Veletsianos, G., Houlden, S., Hodson, J., Gosse, C. (2018). Women Scholars’ Experiences with Online Harassment and Abuse: Self-protection, Resistance, Acceptance, and Self-Blame. New Media & Society, 20(12), 4689-4708. [PDF Preprint]

Abstract: Although scholars increasingly use online platforms for public, digital, and networked scholarship, the research examining their experiences of harassment and abuse online is scant. In this study, we interviewed 14 women scholars who experienced online harassment in order to understand how they coped with this phenomenon. We found that scholars engaged in reactive, anticipatory, preventive, and proactive coping strategies. In particular, scholars engaged in strategies aimed at self-protection and resistance, while often responding to harassment by acceptance and self-blame. These findings have important implications for practice and research, including practical recommendations for personal, institutional, and platform responses to harassment, as well as scholarly recommendations for future research into scholars’ experiences of harassment.

Hodson, J., Gosse, C., Veletsianos, G., Houlden, S. (2018). I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends: The Ecological Model and Support for Women Scholars Experiencing Online Harassment. First Monday, 23(8). doi: https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i8.9136

Abstract: This article contributes to understanding the phenomenon of online abuse and harassment toward women scholars. We draw on data collected from 14 interviews with women scholars from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and report on the types of supports they sought during and after their experience with online abuse and harassment. We found that women scholars rely on three levels of support: the first level includes personal and social support (such as encouragement from friends and family and outsourcing comment reading to others); the second includes organizational (such as university or institutional policy), technological (such as reporting tools on Twitter or Facebook), and sectoral (such as law enforcement) support; and, the third includes larger cultural and social attitudes and discourses (such as attitudes around gendered harassment and perceptions of the online/offline divide). While participants relied on social and personal support most frequently, they commonly reported relying on multiple supports across all three levels. We use an ecological model as our framework to demonstrate how different types of support are interconnected, and recommend that support for targets of online abuse must integrate aspects of all three levels.

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