Pile-ons and mass attacks on social media is something that manifests uniquely on online platforms, and pose challenges to the execution of criminal justice. Under the current legal system, online trolls and harassers enjoy high degrees of anonymity and can exercise relative ease in “organising” these attacks on other users that they consider their opposition. This can be for a variety of reasons, typically for holding opposing views on politics, socio-political discourse such as transgender rights, or simply for openly liking certain celebrities and public figures.
The motivational factors for inciting verbal or action-based online attacks are becoming increasingly lower with the rise of online virtue-signalling and the increasing polarisation of opinions. Sometimes these attacks do not even contain harmful statements attacking the target and could simply involve excessive spamming of the same copy and pasted content on the target’s posts, congesting the traffic on their page, and making it difficult for them to navigate their profile amidst the spam. Sometimes these mass attacks may even extend to contacting the target’s family, friends, or workplace to spam and harass them too, or to spread false information about the target.
The instigators of the attacks usually have a significant following and once they bring a particular user to their followers’ attention, collective action is often taken swiftly to pile onto the target. The bulk of the threats and harassment do not come from the instigator themselves, but the “responders” of these mass attacks.
With whom does legal liability lie?
The large number and varying roles of these online attackers pose certain difficulties for narrowing down specific persons liable for the harassment. Most of the time, there are reasonable grounds for bringing legal action for defamation and harassment against the people contributing to the mass attacks in outwardly harmful and malicious ways, but it is also important to consider the possibilities of curbing the problem at its root and focusing on the instigators in a different capacity as well.
However, this proves to be difficult as they can claim to not have done or said anything causing harm or distress directly to the victim, particularly when considering their ways of instigating attacks, such as reposting without words, or making irrelevant comments that can only be understood as a sign to target specific users by their followers.
Under the current law in England and Wales, the most common and straightforward way to prevent further harassment or defamation from such mass attacks is to employ the use of civil injunctions or cease and desist letters. In Blaney v Persons Unknown (2009), the alternative means of serving an injunction through direct messages in Twitter (now known as X) was permitted by the court due to a lack of other methods to identify the respondent. However, it should be noted that legal actions against anonymous accounts online are often difficult and drawn-out due to typically needing to obtaining orders from the court to access social media platform user data to ascertain the identity of the abusers.
As the subject of abusive pile-ons, it is wise to keep screenshotted evidence of all the targeted content, with information such as the usernames, dates and times, and the message or post content clearly shown by the screenshots.
If you need advice or assistance, please contact Nath Solicitors on 0203 983 8278 or get in touch with the firm online.