All Harm Motivations (4)

Though online abuse mirrors the variety and complexity of real-world abuse, the motivations of online actors enacting some kind of harm can be categorized into a relatively small number of broad categories.

Understanding each of these categories is essential to building the counter-abuse protections that can defend against them. Financially motivated actors will invest time and resources in understanding your platform's defenses. Sexually motivated actors may pursue their objectives without concern for their being caught. Personally motivated actors typically lack the technical sophistication of other abusers. These are just a few generalizations that can be made when thinking about online abuse through the lens of actor motivation.

Browsing through the abuse types that are motivated by a given goal, and you are certain to find structural commonalities in harm, that when synthesized, have the power to generate analogies toward solvency.