Managing Online and Social Media Harassment

• AllOne Employee Assistance Program (EAP). This employee benefit provides confidential support services, including counseling, well-being support, coaching, and other work-life services.
• Wellbeing Services for Students. Wellbeing Services and Wellness 360 offers a range of mental health treatment and prevention services for UT San Antonio students.
• Student Assistance Services. Serves as a central hub and collaborative resource to assist students with navigating academic and non-academic matters related to their enrollment. They can help resolve situations or circumstances and support their progress to degree completion and personal and professional development.

• Describe the incident in detail.
• Share which platforms you are being harassed on.
• Identify when the harassment began.
• Explain whether it is connected to something specific, such as an article, commentary, social media post, event, program, or class at UT San Antonio.

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Save and Share Evidence

• Take screenshots of captions and comments with dates and time stamps in case the posts are deleted later.
• Consider screen recording as well to preserve evidence.
• Save any emails, voicemails, or text messages you receive arising from online behavior.

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Temporarily disable profiles or accounts

• Ignore. A decision not to engage is a form of action, so you can choose not to respond. Social media agitators, or trolls, aim to elicit a response. In many cases, trolls move on when ignored. But if you decide a response is necessary, make your response short, concise, and fact-based.
• Mute. If what someone says about you on social media is causing you distress, you can change your settings to mute them. In most instances, the harassing party is not notified that you have muted them, and you can ignore their comments.
• Block. Several social media platforms allow you to selectively prevent others from following you, seeing your posts, or commenting on your content by blocking them.
• Report. Reporting a user’s behavior to a social media platform could result in the person's account being suspended or their messages being taken down if they violate the platform’s terms of use. Fake or impersonation accounts can also be reported to the social media website. Most platforms have community standards of behavior. It is important to take screenshots of captions and comments on social media with dates and time stamps in case the posts are deleted later.
• Secure. Ensure two-factor authentication is set up on your social media channels and set strong, unique passwords that are changed regularly. This can prevent external actors from accessing private information in your profile or hacking your account to impersonate you or take other malicious actions.

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If you suspect that the harassment is from a member of the UT San Antonio community

• Review the Student Code of Conduct, which serves as the core policy for establishing standards of behavior within the UT San Antonio community for students.
• Review the Faculty Rights and Responsibilities which elaborates on the standards of professional conduct, derived from general professional consensus about the existence of certain precepts as basic to acceptable faculty behavior.
• Review HOP 3.03 Discipline and Dismissal (For Classified Employees), which states harassing behavior is subject to discipline.
• Review UT San Antonio’s Nondiscrimination policy for information on discrimination or harassment that potentially violates the policy. The policy defines harassment and discrimination for incidents that impact individuals from legally protected categories and serves as a resource for providing definitions and responsibilities of community members for reporting.
• Report alleged violations of discrimination and harassment to the Equal Opportunity Services (EOS)/Title IX Office. The Incident Reporting page of the EOS website provides easy access to forms for reporting. Students, staff, or faculty with questions may contact eos.office@utsa.edu or 210-458-4120.

 

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Beware of Impersonators

It is important to note that there is widespread reporting about sophisticated disinformation campaigns across various platforms. This includes bots posting inflammatory comments intended to divide further and inflame those who consume information regularly via social media platforms, as many individuals in the UT San Antonio community do. Online agitators who seek to create discord in communities may also impersonate community members.

• Read the terms of use for online platforms and messaging apps carefully. For example, some platforms may allow users to sign up as a university community member based on location and proximity data (which could enable non-university users to set up an account without a university email address), while promoting their platforms as allowing students to connect with other “classmates.” Not all these sites and platforms verify their affiliation with UT San Antonio.
• Consult the terms of service for online platforms to understand what types of behavior violate the platform’s standards of conduct and report violations when you see them.

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Doxxing

• Adjust your social media settings to avoid sharing personal information that could be used to find you:
  • Ensure that your profiles and usernames/handles are private.
  • Set your social media posts to “friends only” and be selective of who you accept as friends.
  • Review and employ the privacy settings of all social media platforms you use.
  • Limit the use of third-party applications within social media.
  • Remove any addresses, places of work, and specific locations from your accounts.
    • Be mindful of where you "check in" when posting on social media.
  • Separate your personal and academic/professional personas. Determine whether it’s necessary or prudent to list on your social media that you study/work at UT San Antonio. Consider carefully whether it’s safe to list your cell phone number in your UT San Antonio or personal email signature.
• Dox yourself to understand better what personal information others can see about you online:
  • Google yourself.
  • Perform a reverse image search on your most-used photos of yourself.
  • Audit your social media profiles.
  • Check your resumes, website bios, and personal websites for information you would prefer to keep private.
• Set up Google Alerts to get notified if Google receives new results with your data.
• If you maintain a personal internet domain name for your public web or email activity, work with your Domain Name Service (DNS) provider to hide your domain registration information from WHOIS (a database of all registered domain names on the web).
• Practice good cyber hygiene. Set up two-step verification; use strong passwords for all your accounts. Additionally, consider varying your usernames and passwords across platforms and services to help prevent hacking or hijacking your accounts.

• If you think any information that has been exposed is protected data, you should immediately report personal identifiable information (PII) and/or information about physical or mental health conditions to the UTSA PD or the local jurisdiction where you reside.
• If you suspect a member of the UTSA community has caused the doxxing, report to UTSA PD, Student Conduct and Community Standards (SCCS), or Equal Opportunity Services/Title IX Office (EOS). UT San Antonio policies and expectations for community behavior establish doxxing as a violation of multiple policies.
• If you are experiencing online harassment unrelated to UT San Antonio, you can report it to your local police department. UT San Antonio's policies are not enforceable when it comes to preventing doxxing from external actors.
• If the incident involves unauthorized access to UT San Antonio's electronic accounts or resources, report it to the University Technology Solutions at techcafe@utsa.edu. 
  • • UTS may be able to provide an alternate email address for students, faculty, and staff who have been affected by doxxing. Please contact techcafe@utsa.edu to discuss options to adjust your UT San Antonio email address.
    • Faculty and staff can opt out of being listed in the UT San Antonio Directory by contacting People Excellence (PE).
  • Students can opt out of being listed in the UT San Antonio Directory by following these steps:
    • Go to the following form to request to be withheld from the UT San Antonio's Directory: restrictstudentdirectoryinfo.pdf.  

• Inform the platform or website where your personal information was leaked. Many platforms have policies to handle doxxing and can assist in removing the data.
• Request that your information be removed from the internet, which can be time-consuming. Some companies offer this service and assistance.