Bearing Witness

Trolling and doxxing: Graduate students sharing their research online speak out about hate

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, November 7, 2023
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Graduate students are especially vulnerable to online hate, because cultivating a visible social media presence is considered essential for mobilizing their research, gaining credibility and finding opportunities as they prepare to compete in an over-saturated job market.

Key Points: 
  • Graduate students are especially vulnerable to online hate, because cultivating a visible social media presence is considered essential for mobilizing their research, gaining credibility and finding opportunities as they prepare to compete in an over-saturated job market.
  • Our research has examined the experiences of graduate students who have encountered online hate while conducting their research or disseminating it online, and a wider landscape of university protocol and policies.

New policies needed to support researchers

  • Research by communications scholars George Veletsianos and Jaigris Hodson, who are part of the Public Scholarship and Online Abuse research group, finds that scholars online may be targeted for a range of reasons, but “women in particular are harassed partly because they happen to be women who dare to be public online.” Online hatred disproportionately affects women, Black, Indigenous, racialized, queer, trans and other marginalized scholars.
  • New frameworks and policies are required that protect and care for increasingly diverse academic communities to foster equity and diversity.

Impacts and inadequate support

  • Online harassment restricts which research projects are able to proceed and who is able to pursue them.
  • It affects not only researchers’ well-being and career prospects, but by extention, their fields of study and members of the public served by it.

Lack of clear and accessible structures, procedures

  • Ketchum addresses challenges related to public scholarship in her book Engage in Public Scholarship!
  • Without clear structures and procedures for reporting harassment and supporting community members at an institutional level, harassment is treated by universities as isolated incidents without grasping the scale of the issue.

‘Bearing Witness’

  • We have facilitated a number of workshops and events that foreground experiences of online harassment among graduate students.
  • This work has been done with support from the Institute for Research on Digital Literacies, under the direction of Natalie Coulter.

Researcher experiences of harassment

  • Participants also said research methods seminars, research ethics board certification courses and conversations with supervisory committees had not addressed the possibility of encountering online harassment.
  • The online harassment students encountered also derailed or significantly curtailed their research projects.

Resources to help protect from harassment

  • There are many online resources graduate students can consult to protect themselves from online harassment.
  • Resources from PEN America and gaming communities provide cybersecurity tips to prevent doxxing, assess threats and report harassment to platforms and law enforcement.

Important work begins with witness

  • This important work must begin with institutions bearing witness to graduate students’ experiences.
  • University staff and faculty must listen to individual voices so that the issue of online harassment can be understood in its full scale and complexity.


Alex Borkowski receives funding from SSHRC. Natalie Coulter receives funding from SSHRC, as well as from internal grants at York University. Marion Tempest Grant does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.