Staying Safe While Doing Science in Public: Emerging Best Practices for Social Media

Doing science in public has incalculable benefits for professional networking, science advocacy, and public outreach, but it also carries significant risks. Online harassment related to social media use can pose significant emotional hardship, negatively impact professional standing, and even threaten physical welfare. Women, people of color, and other underrepresented people in science are disproportionately targeted for anonymous online harassment. We analyzed our experiences with online harassment, and tactics for managing this harassment. While anecdotal, our experiences cover scientists with differing identities and fields, demonstrating that while the details change the overarching patterns remain the same. Fear of becoming a target poses a significant barrier to engaging in public discourse about science. But it is possible to mitigate this risk. Successful strategies for social media to promote science while staying safe are slowly creating a body of emerging best practices. These tactics include proactively restricting access to personal information, developing strategies for identifying and responding to deliberate antagonists (trolls), and choosing when and how to participate in volatile topics. They also require full-community engagement from creating support networks, partnering with allies to manage sudden floods of hostility, and educating on security practices for protecting colleagues' potentially sensitive personal information. It is our hope that frank and open discussion of the realistic threat passed by harassment and strategies for mitigating that threat will jump start a culture of online safety amongst geoscientists, and encourage our most vulnerable and underrepresented scientists to participate in the public sphere.