When it comes at you

This is happening now. You did not bring it on yourself, and being frightened is the correct response rather than a sign you are unsuited to this.

The next five minutes. Stop replying. Then capture what is on your screen before it is deleted. Everything else can wait. Nobody has to approve any of it.

What this page cannot do. It cannot tell you what is criminal where you live, and it names no platform, because settings change monthly. It gives you the order to do things in. It picks up where answering hostile replies stops: that guide is about what to send back, and here sending anything back is the wrong move.

The first hour

Stop replying

Everything you write now is fuel, and can be cropped away from what it answered. A reply also confirms that you are reading and that you are reachable, which is what a pile-on runs on. Silence feels like surrender, especially when what is being said about you is false. Correcting a record is something you do later, from a stronger position, holding evidence.

Capture it before it disappears

The material deleted first is the material you will need. The worst posts usually go within hours. For each item, capture five things.

1. The post itself, full screen rather than a crop of the words.
2. The account name and handle, and the profile page as it stands today.
3. The date and time.
4. The web address, saved separately as plain text.
5. The reply chain, including the replies agreeing with it.

The fifth is the one people skip and later want. One abusive post proves little. A thread of forty, with named accounts, shows a pattern.

Capturing evidence properly covers original files and storage. Reading all this closely is distressing, and that is a real cost. Do it once, then stop looking.

Do not delete your own posts yet

Three reasons, and the third decides it. Deleting reads as an admission. It destroys your own record of what you wrote, which is often the only thing disproving the version being circulated. And the copies were made before you woke up. Taking something down may be right later, after a full capture and after you have told somebody.

Tell one person tonight

Not eventually. Being alone with this does more damage than the messages do.

“Something is going on online and it is aimed at me. I am not in danger. I do not need advice. I need one person to know it is happening.”

The first day

Work out what is actually exposed

Do this before touching any settings, because it tells you which settings matter. Search your name and handle as a stranger would, in a browser you are not signed into.

Look for four things in this order. Your address. Your workplace. Your family. Your children’s school.

Address first, because it is the only one where somebody can arrive.

Lock down what is public

Reduce who can see your accounts and who can contact you unapproved. Look at old posts showing where you live, photographs taken outside your home, the profile naming your employer, and the handle you reuse somewhere personal. Ask close family to tighten their accounts and to stop tagging you. Where a public register carries your address, find out whether it can be withheld.

This costs reach you spent years building, and a few will read it as guilt. Do it anyway.

Tell your employer before a stranger does

This feels wrong and it is right. An employer contacted first by an angry stranger is managing a surprise. An employer told by you is managing a known problem, with your version already on the table.

“I want to tell you about this myself before anybody else does. I was targeted online over something I posted in a personal capacity. You may get emails about me. Here is what I posted, and here is what is being said about it.”

“I am not asking you to defend me. I am asking that anything arriving is passed to me and not answered.”

Ask for one named person to handle it, and confirm it in writing the same day.

Know what this can start. Some employers open a process about you rather than about the people targeting you. That happens either way, and this way you are not answering it cold.

Report it, and expect little

Report on your own behalf, and never organise others to report one account.

Most reports of a pile-on produce nothing visible, and accounts return. What reporting reliably produces is a dated record that you raised it. That record is what an officer, a lawyer or a university asks for later. Report for the record, not the result.

When it becomes a police matter

This page will not tell you the law where you are. A confidently wrong summary of a criminal threshold is worse than none.

Some things are treated as criminal almost everywhere. Credible threats of violence. Sustained harassment of a named person. Publishing private details to encourage others to act on them. Sexual threats and intimate images.

Incitement to hatred is criminal in many countries and not in others.

Thresholds differ enormously, and so does what police act on. Four questions to take to somebody local.

1. What conduct here is criminal where I live, and under which offence?
2. How many incidents, over how long, make this a course of conduct?
3. How do I report it, and can I do that without attending in person?
4. What order can a court make, and can I get one without the police?

Ask a national police force’s guidance on online abuse. Ask a civil liberties organisation that tracks it, a community security body, or a solicitor doing harassment work. Write down who told you and when. What goes stale fastest is the reporting route. Offences move more slowly.

If somebody arrives at your home, or a threat names a time and place, that is an emergency call, not a research project.

The first week

Keep a log

The log matters more than any single screenshot, because one message is an incident and forty is a pattern. Pattern persuades everybody you will eventually have to persuade.

One line per event. Date, time, account, what happened, where the capture is saved, what you did.

The job, the landlord, the university

Ask each one question in writing. What is your policy when a member of staff, a tenant or a student is targeted online? The answer given before anybody is under pressure beats the answer given after.

Whether to make a statement

Usually no. A statement restarts the clock and hands them a fresh document to quote.

Yes in three situations. A specific false claim is circulating among people whose opinion of you matters. An institution has asked you to account for yourself. It has reached the press. Then say it once and do not defend it afterwards.

“The post being circulated is mine and here it is in full. The description of what it meant is not accurate. I have nothing further to add.”

Stop watching it

This gets its own instruction because it is the main cause of lasting harm. The compulsion to keep checking is not vigilance. It is the pile-on using your own attention against you, long after useful information stopped arriving.

Hand the accounts to somebody else for a week, with the log and one rule. They tell you about anything naming your address, your workplace or your children. Nothing else.

This works, and you can do it. People come out of these intact. They are the ones who stopped replying early, captured it once, told somebody the same day, and handed over the watching.

If it is happening to somebody in your group

Almost nothing is written for the people around the target, and they decide how badly it lands.

Contact them the same day, privately. Never issue a group statement about them without their agreement, and never ask them to stay quiet to protect the group’s reputation. Take the watching job, offered rather than waiting to be asked. People in this state do not ask.

“I am not going to ask what you posted. Tell me what you need this week and I will do it.”

Then contact them again in week three, when everybody else has stopped.

Children and family

Tell your children’s school before somebody else does, so an unknown caller is treated as one. Ask relatives not to defend you in public, because it extends the story and puts them inside it. For what to say to your children, see talking to your children.

Doing this before it happens

Most of what an opponent finds was already public and was put there by somebody else. There is a companion page, what is findable about you, which is a checklist you work through once, in about forty-five minutes, before you put your name to anything. It is the half of this that is worth doing on a quiet evening rather than on the worst day.

The honest limit

Most of this does not stop. It fades.

Volume usually falls away within days to a few weeks, once attention moves. The search results last longer, and some accounts return for years. Promising an ending would be cruel, and anybody promising one is guessing.

What you can change is how exposed you are, what record exists, and whether you go through it alone. That is what is in your hands.

The folder, the log, and one name

Fill in the blanks171 words

Two questions answered from memory, tonight rather than at two in the morning. What are the first three things you do when a wave starts, in order? And which things, if they happen, mean this stops being something you handle yourself?

Then write these down before closing the page. Make the folder, open the log, write one person’s name and number at the top of it, and message them tonight.

If a new wave starts, then I will stop replying, capture the first ten items in one sitting, and log them before reading further.

If anybody names my address, my workplace or my children, then I will save it, ring the person named in my log that evening, and contact the local body I noted for online abuse the next morning.

And the obstacle, because it is the same one every time. If I find myself checking the replies again at midnight, then I will hand my accounts to the person in my log and turn notifications off for seven days.