Countering online abuse: advice for individual artists and team members

Take charge of social media accounts

You can make all of your social accounts private if you want to. Go through the settings for each of your accounts to ensure you’re happy with what people can see and how people can contact you. In particular, make sure you’ve chosen settings you’re happy with in regards to:

◆ What you’re notified about – turn on “high quality content” filters where possible. On X for example you can choose whether you’re notified (or not!) by people you don’t know, who don’t follow you and those with new accounts etc.

◆ Whether people can tag you – tagging people on disturbing images is a common bullying tactic. You can change your settings so people can’t tag you on images to avoid it.

◆ Whether your location is shared – there is rarely a need for people to know exactly where you are while you’re there. For example, if you like to check in on FourSquare etc, you can do it afterwards.

◆ Decide who can send you private messages – perhaps only people you follow.

Additionally, try to claim accounts with your name to avoid impersonation, even if you’re not going to use them.

Protecting your personal details online

One of the main things to try and protect is your personal information. If you search for yourself whilst you’re in the middle of an attack, you’ll simply see lots of upsetting information. Instead, search for your information such as your phone number, private email address or real address. Use inverted commas around data which appears in a specific format like your phone number to tell search engines you’re searching for something specific.

Unfortunately, personal data can get into the public domain in a number of ways including via the Electoral Roll, Companies House, domain registration or the phone book. It’s best to find out what information is out there before you find yourself in the spotlight. To do this, you can use people-finder websites including findukpeople.com, 192.com and UKphonebook.com. Notoriously, they’re often able to find shocking amounts of information in totally legal ways.

If you find things that you don’t want to be public, contact the websites and search engines listing them and ask for them to be removed, or use services such as undoxme.org and databrokerswatch.org.

Think about your accounts

Have different accounts for different purposes e.g. public vs personal activity. Sign up to different accounts with different email addresses for different purposes. Use different images as your social icons to avoid people linking accounts you don’t want linked.

Depending on the platform, you often don’t have to use your real name on social media accounts. If you’re working on a contentious project, you may consider removing links between your physical self and your virtual accounts. This is easier on X but not permitted on Facebook and LinkedIn, although on those platforms you can close down who can contact you.

Be conscious of what you share

Personal details, locations, addresses, contact details and photos all offer up information: Be careful not to share “jigsaw” information (about children too), which when put together forms a detailed picture of you, your life and your loved ones. Some people even delete their posts regularly, to simply reduce the trail of content attached to themselves.

Protect yourself from hacking

Use 2 stage verification where it’s offered, find out more at twofactorauth.org.

Use strong passwords with services like 1Password and LastPass.

Useful tools for removing old content

The Verge – How to find your oldest social media posts and delete them.