[Foundation-l] Stalking Article

Thu Jun 12 00:16:54 UTC 2008

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 10:05 AM, Durova <nadezhda.durova at gmail.com> wrote:

> As some of you know by now, Daniel Brandt recently published a list of all
> my friends on Facebook.  The timing strongly implies he did so in response
> to my decision to step forward about having been the target of violent
> threats.

Wouldn't be the first time he's enabled stalking or harassment, whether
intentionally or not.

On a more practical and serious level, one thing that could have helped in
> David Shankbone's situation is if there were a global block feature, and
> perhaps a global protect for user pages.  David's stalker followed him
> across dozens of projects.  One thing that often happens with such people
> is
> that they test boundaries and become aggressive when they discover that
> boundaries are weak or absent.  By erecting better boundaries onsite we
> improve the chances that a problem will end swiftly.

I rather appreciate that suggestion -- it's both an immediate problem and
something we can hopefully fix within our current means. The global sysop
proposal on meta might be relevant, here. I'll also mention that IRC has
proven very useful to me in dealing with cross-wiki problems in real time,
before.

Off-site and especially real world harassment and stalking are nothing short
of heinous. Unfortunately, it's very difficult for most of us to help, once
things go outside the WMF-sphere or offline altogether. That's a key topic:
what can we do, as individual users and as a community?

As a cultural matter, we can and should encourage people to be very careful
about what they reveal online. We should be supportive when someone is
victimized. Beyond that, I hate to admit that I feel somewhat helpless.