As social media becomes increasingly pervasive, it continues to restructure our interactions and shape how information is disseminated and exchanged. For instance, social media has made it easier for estranged friends to reconnect online via Facebook and MySpace and for bloggers to fill in gaps in mainstream news coverage.

However, social media has also given rise to new and particularly virulent forms of harassment. A brief survey of news reports - both recent and those spanning the last few years - reveal three broad categories of harassment. The following will hopefully serve as useful background for future blog posts centering on the extent to which existing laws can adequately deter and punish cyberharassment across these categories, if at all.

Harassment motivated by animus toward individual

Over the last several years, newspapers and blogs have been replete with stories about “cyberbullies” who utilize social media to threaten, intimidate or disparage particular individuals, oftentimes anonymously. This form of harassment captured headlines across the country in 2008 when Lori Drew, a forty-seven year old neighbor of a Missouri teenager who committed suicide over a row on MySpace, was indicted for the role she played in the thirteen-year-old’s death. Drew created a MySpace profile in the name of a fictitious boy and amassed an online “teenage mob” that ridiculed their classmate until she took her own life.

After the St. Charles County prosecutor decided not to prosecute Drew, citing the fact that Drew did not break any existing Missouri law, federal prosecutors brought charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — a statute that the District Judge presiding over the case ultimately concluded did not apply to cyberharassment. (Responses by states to this regulatory void — and their First Amendment implications — will hopefully be the subject of a future blog posts as well.)

Since the Drew story broke, instances of cyberharasment where the harassment is targeted at a particular individual has regularly been in the news. Last month, the Seattle Times reported that 28 middle-schoolers were suspended for allegedly bullying a classmate online. And, tragically, national media outlets reported that Phoebe Prince, a fifteen-year-old who moved from Ireland to Massachusetts, hung herself after being the subject to intense bullying on Facebook and at school in January.

Harassment motivated by animus toward group

Another form of harassment occurs where victims are targeted based on their race, gender, religion or sexual orientation. Perhaps the most widely covered story involved a prominent software developer and blogger who was forced offline and canceled public appearances after anonymous comments were posted about her online, including death and rape threats, postings of her address and social security number, and an image of her next to a noose. From the Washington Post:

[Kathy] Sierra, whose… case has attracted international attention, has suspended blogging. Other women have censored themselves, turned to private forums or closed comments on blogs. Many use gender-neutral pseudonyms. Some just gut it out. But the effect of repeated harassment, bloggers and experts interviewed said, is to make women reluctant to participate online -- undercutting the promise of the Internet as an egalitarian forum.

Professor Danielle Keats Citron, in a law review article entitled Cyber Civil Rights, traces the various activities of “online mobs” that seek to silence the voices of women, certain religious groups, the LGBT community, and racial minorities on the Internet. In addition to the harassment of Sierra, she discusses the AutoAdmit scandal and white supremacist websites that targeted the mother of a biracial girl by posting a picture of the child alongside bomb-making instructions and posted the phone number and address of an Asian-American columnist who wrote about a hate crimes march.

As Professor Citron argues, this category of harassment underscores the need for a more robust understanding of cyber-civil rights and cyber-liberties by lawmakers as these attacks are not motivated by personal animus, but membership of a traditionally protected class.

Harassment motivated by animus toward everyone

Lastly, and perhaps most disconcertingly, are instances where the online harassment is motivated by animus toward, well, seemingly everyone. The New York Times ran a story a couple of years ago about several powerful hackers that can wreak havoc on just about anyone’s reputation online at any given time.

The story follows several exceedingly tech savvy and misanthropic “trolls” who ambush everyone from the Church of Scientology to the Epilepsy Foundation (where, according to the article, they flooded the site’s forums with flashing images and animated color fields). Bloggers generally also seem to be a broad category of disdain:

I make people afraid for their lives… Trolling is basically Internet eugenics… I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!

One of the most legendary trolls claims to bring in millions of dollars annually as a hacker while espousing “the ruin lifestyle”: “moving from condo to condo, living out of three bags, no name, no possessions, all assets held offshore.” He picked up the Times reporter in a Rolls Royce Phantom and later presented him with a copy of his social security number.

These trolls that make untraceability their modus operandi welcome in an unprecedented form of online anarchy that will continue to challenge policymakers long into the future.