Online hate crimes can involve harassment, incitement to violence, or the sharing of personal information to target individuals or groups based on characteristics such as race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or disability.
In digital environments, harmful and potentially unlawful conduct can take several forms, including:
- Harassment and trolling: Coordinated or persistent abusive behaviour directed at a person because of their identity. This may include repeated hateful messages, targeted online abuse, or harassment through social media, messaging platforms or online gaming.
- Doxxing and swatting: Publishing or sharing a person's personal information online without their consent (doxxing), or making false reports to emergency services to provoke an emergency response to the person's address (swatting)
- Hate speech and symbols: Sharing slurs, offensive memes, hateful usernames, or ‘algospeak’ (coded language and numbers to bypass platform filters) to promote white supremacist or extremist ideologies.
- Impersonation and defamation: Creating fake accounts or online profiles to impersonate another person, spread hateful content in their name, damage their reputation pr humiliate them.