Online abuse, harassment, cyber trolling costing Australians $3.7 billion

Institute For Ethical Hacking Course and Ethical Hacking Training in Pune – India

Extreme Hacking | Sadik Shaikh | Cyber Suraksha Abhiyan

Credits: ABC

At one stage in her career as a video gamer, a typical work day for Vanessa Holmes included violent and terrifying threats against her life.

Threats of rape and murder were the most common form of abuse, sent via messages to accompany her live-stream on the popular gaming site Twitch.

“The kind of abuse I’d get, it was daily,” Ms Holmes said.

“In many different ways. Emails, through live chat, through private messages.”

Ms Holmes’s site was designed to be a community for video-game enthusiasts all over the world, but instead, her platform was plagued by horrific abuse.

“They would call me every other name under the sun,” she said.

The abuse became so constant, so vitriolic, that the subsequent anxiety and fear forced her to quit her work as a gamer altogether.

But, while she lost her online identity as a professional gamer, Ms Holmes had kept pages of expletive-laden messages as proof of the abuse directed at her by anonymous senders.

The contents of the messages were too graphic for the ABC to publish.

“I got really quite scared and I got a lot of anxiety,” Ms Holmes said.

She believed the often sexualised nature of the violent threats had to do with her being a woman who occupied a space online.

“People are getting used to seeing females online in gaming nowadays, but women still experience a lot of the kinds of abuse that men wouldn’t experience.”

In the end, there was no stopping the abusers.

“There were certain people who were quite relentless for months,” she said.

“They were coming back and making new accounts.

“You can choose to just block and delete, but they’re going to make new accounts, and there are just so many different ways they can contact you.”

While Ms Holmes’ experience was common, it was still little-understood in a world struggling to work out how best to police online behaviour.

New figures by the Australia Institute revealed 27 per cent of Australians have been victims of abusive language, while 18 per cent had been sent unwanted sexual messages or nude pictures.

More than a third of respondents — equivalent to 8.8 million Australians — said they had experienced one or more forms of online harassment, with women most likely to be targeted.

Online abusers target those closest to victims

Like Ms Holmes, journalist Sherele Moody had grown used to threats and abuse as part of her work writing about domestic violence for News Corp.

But what she could not predict was how far the trolls would go.

In 2017, she came home to find her Great Dane had been poisoned.

“He was fed some sort of corrosive chemical,” Ms Moody said.

“It literally caused the flesh to peel away on his mouth, throat and oesophagus.”

But, while her dog survived after a long period of treatment and recovery, last year her horse was murdered.

“I received a message on my phone from a strange person saying they had ‘sent him to the doggers’, or the slaughter house,” she said.

“When we found him, he had been dead for about five days and it looked like his neck may have been broken.”

Ms Moody said she had become resilient, but that it came at a cost, including undertaking security assessments and having to limit her personal information available online, including no longer uploading photos of her pets.

“You turn one tap off and they find another tap to come through,” she said.

The work of a moment is costing Australians billions

According to the Australia Institute — who crunched the numbers around medical bills and loss of income — online abuse and harassment had already cost Australians $3.7 billion.

Journalist and author Ginger Gorman, who commissioned the report, said she was shocked by what she read.

She realised the issue was of such a magnitude that it was not only costing people their mental health and livelihood, but society as a whole.

“I knew these figures would be big, because a lot of cyber-hate victims had told me that they’d shelled out loads of cash and that they’d missed a lot of work, but I was frankly shocked that the numbers were so big,” Ms Gorman said.

“I didn’t realise that nearly 40 per cent of the population was experiencing that kind of cyber-hatred online.

“I started looking at the case studies together, as opposed to separately, and I thought ‘wow, this is costing a lot of money’.”

Ms Gorman found trolls did not always fit the popular stereotype bestowed upon them.

The damage they caused took on various forms and had a myriad of impacts on victims.

“They might lose their job, they might have their reputation wrecked online, there’s incitement to suicide, there’s real life stalking,” she said.

“There are multiple real-life harms.”

Abuse the ‘trade-off’ for women being online

For Ms Holmes, the abuse came in confusing and insidious forms — often those who abused her had also donated money to her site, ensuring their comments were made public.

“If you want to be an online personality, that’s going to have to be something to get used to,” she said.

“There are so many different ways they can anonymise themselves and attack you.”

And she said while she missed her life as a gamer, she had accepted she would never return to it.

“I do miss it. I’m quite nostalgic for that life, but I’ve kind of accepted that that’s the trade-off of having that life,” she said.

Gendered violence, racism more common

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said being online gave abusers a freedom not experienced in the real world, where people met face-to-face.

“That gendered abuse, the nature of the harassment is very different. It’s sexualised. It’s targeted. It’s often violent threats of harm,” she said

Ms Grant said support and help were available for cyber-bullying victims via the eSafety website.

But she said more needed to be done to monitor and prevent the vitriol that was ruining lives and costing Australians on multiple levels.

“What we’re saying to the technology platforms is, ‘you know that things can go wrong when you create platforms that will facilitate human interaction, so what kinds of risk assessments are you doing up front?’

“And ‘what kinds of safety protections are you building into the platform before you go to market, rather than retrofitting once the damage has been done?'”

Ms Grant said she had seen firsthand the “absolute devastation targeted online harassment can bring to women’s lives”.

“I’ve seen families dissolve, people lose jobs, people not be able to function — and have both mental and physical manifestations of the stress that is caused by people trying to destroy their lives,” she said.

“It’s really quite harrowing to see what these victims experience.”

www.extremehacking.org

Sadik Shaikh | Cyber Suraksha Abhiyan, Ethical Hacking Training Institute, CEHv10,CHFI,ECSAv10,CAST,ENSA, CCNA, CCNA SECURITY,MCITP,RHCE,CHECKPOINT, ASA FIREWALL,VMWARE,CLOUD,ANDROID,IPHONE,NETWORKING HARDWARE,TRAINING INSTITUTE IN PUNE, Certified Ethical Hacking,Center For Advanced Security Training in India, ceh v10 course in Pune-India, ceh certification in pune-India, ceh v10 training in Pune-India, Ethical Hacking Course in Pune-India