Gangharassment

A form of coordinated harassment where multiple individuals—often organized through social media platforms, servers, or forums—target a single person or a small group with sustained, often simultaneous attacks. Unlike individual harassment, gangharassment leverages numbers to overwhelm, isolate, and terrorize the target. The harassment can take many forms: a flood of hostile messages, coordinated reporting campaigns, doxxing, spreading false rumors across communities, or following the target from space to space. Gangharassment exploits the asymmetry of scale: one person facing ten or fifty makes it impossible to defend, to be heard, or to escape. It is often framed by perpetrators as “just holding someone accountable” or “the community responding to toxicity,” but its effect is systematic destruction of the target’s safety and reputation.

Example: “Within hours of the post going viral, fifty people had flooded her mentions, twelve had emailed her employer, and three had posted her address. Gangharassment: the mob as weapon.”

by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal March 28, 2026