Online Harassment and Real-World Consequences

Online violence has become a route into physical danger for journalists, with global data showing widespread abuse and a sharp rise in reports that it leads to offline harassment, stalking, and other real-world threats. The burden falls hardest on women and marginalized reporters, who face coordinated campaigns that blend identity-based hatred with doxxing, swatting, and cross-platform harassment designed to expose homes, families, and routines. As deepfakes and manipulated clips make reputational attacks faster and cheaper, newsrooms and individuals quietly adjust by limiting visibility, shifting beats, and avoiding assignments that could mobilize the next campaign, narrowing who gets to report and what the public gets to know.

Online harassment against journalists has hardened into a measurable pipeline of physical danger. A 2025 UN Women and UNESCO survey across 119 countries found that 75 percent of women journalists and media workers had experienced online violence in the course of their work, and 42 percent reported offline attacks, abuse, or harassment linked directly to that digital abuse, up from 20 percent in 2020. In the United States, a 2024 IWMF survey of local reporters ahead of the elections found that 33 percent had experienced digital violence connected to their work and 37.7 percent had been threatened with or experienced physical violence. Comment sections, direct messages, and group chats now operate as staging grounds where a name, a photograph, and a beat can be converted into a plan to reach a journalist at home, at an event, or on the street.

Digital attacks were once treated as background noise. That assumption has collapsed under the weight of the evidence. Global research now shows that around three-quarters of women journalists have experienced online violence while doing their jobs, and roughly two in five report that the abuse led to real-world harm, including stalking, assault, and swatting. The share who see a direct online-to-offline link has roughly doubled over a few years, indicating that social feeds, comment threads, and messaging apps now serve not only as spaces for commentary but also as staging grounds for physical risk.

The exposure is not evenly shared. Black, Indigenous, and Jewish women journalists report online violence at markedly higher rates than white peers, and lesbian and bisexual journalists are targeted more heavily than heterosexual colleagues. Arab women journalists report offline attacks linked to online abuse at rates that exceed earlier global baselines. In practice, the people already at risk in their communities are the first to face pile-ons that fuse misogyny, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, and political hostility, and the first to see those attacks cross into physical danger.

In the United States, this is no longer confined to high-profile anchors or national columnists. Surveys of U.S. reporters ahead of the 2024 election found that roughly a third had received digital threats or experienced harassment related to their work, with local and regional journalists covering politics, elections, immigration, and protests most affected. In key states, significant shares of reporters reported threats of physical violence alongside online abuse. For many, harassment spikes when they cover election denial, school board conflicts, police violence, or the genocide in Gaza. Threats arrive by email, direct message, and voicemail, often naming home towns, spouses, or children and promising to confront them offline.

Online violence around Israel and Palestine has followed an even sharper trajectory. Palestinian journalists in Gaza and the West Bank have been targeted by organized smear campaigns that label them militants or “actors,” circulate edited clips and doctored images to discredit their reporting, and accuse them of fabricating civilian suffering. Palestinian women journalists describe a constant stream of threats, gendered slurs, and incitement layered on top of bombardment, displacement, and the deaths of colleagues and family members. On the Israeli side, women journalists and commentators who report publicly on October 7 and the "war," including those in the diaspora, have faced sustained campaigns of sexually graphic abuse, antisemitic threats, and harassment that follows them across platforms.

What was once dismissed as “trolling” now functions as targeting infrastructure. Harassment campaigns single out a journalist, mine their feeds for personal details, track relatives and routines, and push that information into groups that specialize in threats. Doxxing circulates home addresses, phone numbers, and children’s schools. Swatting sends armed police to a reporter’s door based on fabricated emergency calls, a tactic that has moved from gaming culture into politics and media. Online stalking can escalate to cars parked outside homes or offices, or to strangers approaching journalists and their families in public. The gap between a hateful message and a knock on the door has narrowed to almost nothing.

AI has made these campaigns cheaper and more vicious. Generative tools can fabricate sexualized images and videos in minutes, paste a journalist’s face on them, and seed the result across platforms and encrypted channels. Women who investigate corruption, abuse, or sexual violence have been hit with pornographic deepfakes designed to discredit them, intimidate sources, and make editors doubt their judgment. In conflict-related coverage, including Israel–Gaza, deepfakes and manipulated clips are used to paint reporters as liars or enemy propagandists, laying rhetorical groundwork for both online harassment and physical targeting. Some journalists have relocated, stepped back from public life, or abandoned beats after sustained abuse that fused deepfakes, doxxing, and threats of rape or murder. The aim is not only humiliation. It is a removal from the public arena.

The networks behind these attacks rarely stop at a single jurisdiction. A journalist in Gaza can be smeared by accounts operated in multiple countries; a U.S. reporter covering the genocide or local protests can find their name, photo, and personal information circulating through international channels that treat them as legitimate targets. The same story can trigger campaigns against Palestinian reporters on the ground and against U.S. and European journalists thousands of miles away. Borders offer no insulation once a narrative becomes a rallying point.

Newsrooms feel the effects long before an incident reaches a courtroom or a police file. Reporters mute or lock accounts, avoid particular topics, or decline television and panel invitations that would raise their profile. Local reporters who build their careers on open platforms weigh every assignment against the risk of triggering the next coordinated campaign. For many of them, the real calculation is no longer whether a story will attract criticism, but whether it will mobilize a crowd that follows them home.

The scale of these AI-assisted campaigns is now visible in the data. Sexualized deepfakes account for roughly 98 percent of all deepfake videos online and target women in 99 percent of cases. International monitoring shows that nearly one in four women in public life, including journalists, have already faced AI-assisted abuse such as deepfake imagery and manipulated content. For U.S. journalists, the IWMF’s election-year survey shows digital violence and physical threats moving in tandem, with one-third reporting online attacks tied to their work and over one-third reporting threats or incidents of physical violence. Under those conditions, women, journalists of color, queer reporters, and those covering elections, policing, and Israel–Gaza are pushed to mute accounts, decline television and panel invitations, or step away from the most contentious beats. What the public sees as a toxic reply thread functions in practice as an editing tool that shapes who speaks, who stays, and which stories are told at all.

Continue to next installment: Spyware, Surveillance, and Broken Source Protection