​

Viktorya Vilk is a Manager of Special Projects, Free Expression Programs at Pen America. She was a presenter at a full day workshop on surviving journalism in a hostile environment, and talked about online safety for journalists. . 

 

What do you do for Pen America?

 

In particular I work on the ways online abuse is being used a censorship tactic to silence and intimidate writers and journalists and artists as well. I build resources, tools, trainings, do research around and organize the ways in which journalists and writers can defend themselves against online abuse. 

​

What is Pen America?

 

Pen America is a fairly unusual nonprofit in that we have a dual mission we celebrate the written word and we stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide.

​

So you were a presenter at the SEJ conference on how to be safe in a digital and cybersafe environment, how important is it for journalists to be safe in the cyberspace environment and why? 

​

Critically important for journalists to be safe and deliberate in how they use the internet. The reason is that having a digital presence and a digital profile, I would argue has become a professional imperative in terms of practicing journalism. So many journalists use internet social media platforms for research to find sources and be on the cutting edge of news that’s breaking. It’s also really critical to promote work, publish work and share it with other people, and you accept that increasingly journalists have to use the internet to do their jobs. The internet also poses a lot of risks and a lot of threats and subject journalists to a great deal of abuse. The way to try to mitigate that is to be proactive about your digital facing and to be thoughtful about how you exist online. 

 

In your presentation at SEJ, you talked about the importance of establishing a supportive cyber community, or having friends online, how would you recommend a journalist do this and how can it be helpful if they do have any issues online?

​

I spent a lot of time talking to journalists who have been targeted by abuse online, and a lot of them say that the cyber security part - the technical part - is really, really, important, but what actually helps them survive and keeps them doing their job is the human part - or a cyber community. And I recommend two clusters of people. I recommend people have a rapid response team, which is a very small, trusted set of people, maybe a partner, very close colleague that you know really well. You’ll put all those people on either on a WhatsApp group, a private Facebook group or an email chain, somewhere that you’ll know they’ll be there waiting for you. And if you’re in kind of a cluster of abuse and it’s raining down on you all at once, you can let those folks know and they can do a few things for you such as take over your account for a days and report and document things for you so that you don’t have to do it. You’d have to hand them the keys to your account, so it would have to be someone you trust. If you get doxed or your home address gets doxed and your scared and you need to go stay somewhere else they can harbor you, so these are the super trusted people group of people that you know really well. Then I also recommend people use the power and benefit of the internet, have connections with people around the world, your larger network of people. And you leverage those people to have your back when your being attacked. So they might help you report on a platform or they might help you push back against the abuser so that you don’t have to, or they might issue a statement in defense of your reputation or the work is being attacked. Those are the two clusters of people that I think about when I think about supportive cyber security. 

 

And just building on that, if you’re a journalist would you connect with other journalists that you can build a support group with because they might have been in that same situation? 

​

So I think that’s one of the things that I’m finding has started happening, but isn’t happening enough. Journalists who have been dealing with online abuse for many, many years, have gotten really good at dealing with it and they have a lot to offer other journalists who might be experiencing it for the first time or might be afraid that they will experience it. I very much encourage professional associations of journalists, journalists who graduated, journalists who work together on a beat or within a newsroom together, to essentially become a supportive cyber community because unfortunately the abuses are very good at coordinating and I think that we need to have a counter force pushing back against that, and the people that are involved, the better. 

 

 

In talking about online harassment or being the target of harassment, how would you recommend to someone, say a student journalist, or someone new in the field, that can’t recognize abuse right away. How would you recommend they assess if they are the target of abuse or bullying?

 

First thing I would say is to try to figure out how to name what is actually happening to you. There are a whole series of tactics, from impersonation to doxing to hate speech and threats. I recommend folks to go online to our harassment field manual, or other online resource centers online, and we have a page with definitions to describe what’s happening to you and some basic things you can do right away, so try to figure out what’s happening to you and how to describe it. 

Immediately documenting what happening, taking a screen shot and making sure you save a hyperlink to whatever platform its happening on. 

But then I would say most importantly for someone that’s never experienced abuse, it’s not your fault, you are not alone, get help and don’t isolate yourself. Because I think what often happens is people kind of panic, they are shocked and didn’t see it coming, and they start to blame themselves, they isolate and don’t tell anyone what’s going on. And whatever it is that you need to do to take care of your mental well-being and to be able to continue your job is the right thing to do as long as you don’t yourself resort to abusing other people. If you need to take a break from social media, talk to your manager and ask if there are there are resources to get help, or if you need to just call a friend and just vent, do whatever you need to do to take care of yourself. 

 

What other options are there for finding help in addition to having a support group? 

 

The first thing I recommend is figure out what to call what happening to you, what is the term for what’s happening, so you can describe it to other people. Document it, take a screen shot because you need evidence and it’s much easier to show someone what’s happening to you than to try to paraphrase it, especially if there’s insults or slurs or sexual harassment, it’s much easier to show someone a screen shot. If you are writing for a publication, or if you’re a staff writer somewhere, or if you’re in grad school, go to your manager, go to whomever commissioned you or had you write the story and tell them what’s happening, show them a screen shot so they know what’s going on. And then I would say check on your cyber security, make sure that you have good hygiene terms of your passwords, your accounts, that’s you have boundaries between public and private accounts, instead of having all of your personal and private information marked public, make sure its private. Then I would say use what the platforms offer which is reporting, blocking and muting however you can. And if things get really bad consider enlisting allies. There’s a lot of different things that one can do, but those are some of the basic first steps that I would take. 

 

So speaking of having good passwords, you talked about the importance of having good passwords, myself and I’m sure many people out there are terrible at creating safe passwords, what’s the worst password that you’ve ever heard and what’s a good way you recommend to make a really safe one?
 

I think what a lot of people do, we all do this, is pick a password that’s your initials, and maybe your partners initials or your mom initials and then your birthdays, and the problem is that a simple google search for almost any of us, especially if we haven’t done a lot to protect our cyber security in the past, brings up your name and your birthday in about 2 seconds, so it’s really easy form someone to figure out that your password is your name and your birthday or your mom and her birthday. So I would say things like that should be deeply avoided. A safe password is something that is at least 16 characters, which almost nobody is doing, so at least 12, but at least 16 or more if you can. It’s really good to have random clusters of phrases, things like correcthorsebatterystaple or something strange like that that nobody could google or guess. One thing that I do, I have a trick, is that I pick a favorite song lyric or a passage from a favorite book, and I pick the first letter from each one, capitalize some of them and throw in some random characters. It’s something that I can remember, but something that no one in their right mind could ever guess, and if its long enough it becomes very hard for a computer algorithm to churn through to get. 

The best thing I actually recommend is for people to get a password manager, and one thing I want all journalists to know, especially young journalists is that 1password is one of the best password managers out there, it costs money, but they offer accounts for free to journalists in recognition of how important it is for journalists to be cyber secure. 

 

What was it like to present at the conference and did you come away personally with anything after attending and being around so many amazing environmental journalists? 

​

First I would like to say it was an absolute privilege and an honor, I was so impressed by the folks that I met their and the work they are doing, and I actually made two friends which was great. But I also would say that I spent a lot of time thinking about the challenges that these journalists, female sports journalists, work in politics, work on reproductive rights, things that get enormous amounts of abuse, but I don’t think I’d actually though long and hard enough about how much harassment and abuse and how many challenges are faced by journalists who write about science. In fact, outside of the US, there are journalists who write about environmental issues sometimes get murdered, can get kidnapped or get hurt. So I think for me the thing that walked away with is an acute awareness for how much support journalists who write about the environment, actually about science more broadly, should be getting and maybe aren’t getting necessarily. More recognition of the threats and risks they are facing, especially when they have to travel out in the field, and I think there’s a lot that can be improved.

 

 

If there’s one piece of advice that you could give a fresh or aspiring journalist, or a journalism student on how to protect themselves in their current or future career, what would it be?

​

I don’t think I can give one, but I’ll give a concise answer. It’s not an easy time to be a journalist, but we need journalists now more than ever. Use the internet, don’t let it use you. Create clear boundaries between your personal and professional self online - you want to have clear distinctions between your personal and professional presence. Build a supportive cyber community that will have your back when you need them, and take your cyber security seriously, it’s not that hard and your future self will thank your current self if you do it now. 

 

 

And finally, what does it mean to you to be a safe journalist? 

​

In my mind, a safe journalist is a journalist that is able to practice all kinds of journalism, including investigative reporting, watchdog reporting, adversarial journalism, in such a way that they can do their job and maintain editorial independence but at the same time mitigate physical and digital threats and risks in such a way that they feel safe, that they feel that their family is safe, and that they can express themselves freely without being concerned about their physical and digital safety.