A project of the Integrity InstituteBlackmail is the use of coercive tactics to threaten the release of sensitive information unless certain demands are met. This form of abuse jeopardizes user confidence and compromises their personal security.
Platforms can be used by blackmailers (like any communication mechanism) to communicate demands, with the benefits of distance, scale, and potential for anonymity, particularly when paired with pseudonymous payment mechanisms, like forms of cryptocurrency. When threats are issued through a platform, they typically occur within closed channels like private messages, which are generally not subject to the same level of scrutiny as public posts due to expectations of privacy. In each of these respects, platforms may enable blackmailers to achieve greater scale, efficiency, or obscurity, but the fundamental nature of blackmail is the same.
It is instead a different role which is of primary concern to platforms: their ability to be used by blackmailers to find coercive material. Platforms that specialize in sensitive topics (like dating websites for folks with minority sexual preferences, or amateur pornography websites) can be targets for blackmailers, who can see the communities that these platforms form as a list of potential victims, and evidence that can be used to blackmail them. For this reason, platforms have an important role to play in minimizing blackmail along the features that they expose:
- Prevent searches for protected terms
- Make sites harder to automatically scrape
- Align the visibility of content to its sensitivity
It takes a long time to build up community and trust in an online community, but only one incident of bulk blackmail to destroy it. Platforms interested in the safety of their users, or simply their own survival, must take proactive steps to make blackmail attacks less likely.