I was a severely bullied youth. So severely that I have been diagnosed with PTSD as a result, as some of the events were life-threatening. In once instance, I was an early victim of what would now be termed cyber-bullying. It also was illegal under Maryland's two-party consent for voice recordings law, but was none of it was ever prosecuted. Anyway... I was recorded against my consent in day-to-day conversation. The content was then edited to make me sound either like I was intellectually disabled or a homosexual, depending on their mood. Nothing wrong with being either of those things, I'm neither, and obviously this was being done to harm. The audio files were posted on Geocities/Xoom/or one of the other free internet hosting providers at that time in RealPlayer format. This was around 1998-1999, for perspective. Due to Maryland's two-party consent laws, my 14-15yo self was able to get the audio taken down, repeatedly, by the hosting provider. Unfortunately, it took several violations before the provider finally convinced the students in question that their account would be deleted if they stopped. Each time, of course, their account was suspended until they complied. This made them very unhappy, leading to much worse taunting, and even shockingly well-targeted and convincing arguments that I should kill myself. Eventually, the audio was taken down permanently because they got tired of it.
The point of my story being, this is not an easy thing to fight. Online harassment is difficult to fight even when you know the names of the offenders and they've clearly broken a law...that is nothing new.
