Most people in the blogosphere have heard about the harassment of a single blogger who was pushed so far that she posted the death threats she was receiving in her blog (she has since removed the posts and wishes to continue her life, so I'll not post a link to her here).
Last night to nowhere near the extent that she went through I also had a dose of brief cyber attacks although I am sure they will be back and read this post at some point I decided to post it anyway, simply because I needed to say something about how such a small incident has made me feel.
All that ended up happening was a message was posted in my guest book, strangely that was not even to me but to my boyfriend, it was easily deleted and I turned on comments moderation for both my guest book and my comments.
The next wasn't so nice and contained a low level racial slur as well as a good amount of insulting comments directed at me on my Flickr account. That was easily remedied by blocking their account.
So now you are maybe wondering why they decided to attack these two accounts, well simply it was because the pair of them were banned from the forum that I moderate and that my boyfriend owns. The ban was given due to their persistent unsupported sweeping statements about an ethnicity which was tarring everyone with the same brush and creating negative stereotypes based on emotive responses.
What they were posting was (thinly veiled) incitement to cause racial hatred, which under UK law, is illegal and it was bringing down the whole atmosphere of the site.
The worst of it was as in most cases they didn't even realise that a lot of what they were saying was racist.
For me this has made me realise how vulnerable to attacks we are on the internet and in the blogosphere, yes I increased all the protection we are provided with short of locking my blog down but in truth last night that would be the most I would be able to do to prevent them having access.
This morning when I woke up and checked everything there was no more comments or messages but, I found they had actually been all over my blog landing on 25 different pages mainly labelled personal. I felt somewhat violated but there is no way I will lock down my blog for small minded people like that.
I guess one more thing I wanted to make clear to people who think that harassing people like this is safe as they do not know who you are.
You should think again, when you post anything your IP address is logged, on most blogs you visit the owner can see exactly where you have been and what you have been reading, your IP address gives a lot away and continued harassment if reported is looked into by your service provider who of course can track you down via your IP address.
You're not so safe and you're not so anonymous.
Vulnerable in the blogosphere
http://www.mytopsy-turvylife.co.uk/2007/07/vulnerable-in-blogosphere.html
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