Digital Safety Snacks

This June and July, grab your laptops and your phones and sign up for Digital Safety Snacks. PEN America, the Online News Association, and the International Women’s Media Foundation have teamed up to create step-by-step videos and hands-on workshops to help you defend yourself against online abuse. We’ll explain how to protect your most sensitive accounts from hackers and how to dox yourself before someone else does. We want to empower you to feel safer and more secure while maintaining the public profile you need to do your job.

As journalists, we’re increasingly expected to have an online presence and engage on social media, which puts us at risk of abuse. Reporters from marginalized backgrounds—including women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people—are especially at risk. And now, with the United States heading toward the midterm elections, odds are high that attacks against journalists—online and off—will escalate. Abusive trolls join forces to send hateful messages, impersonate, hack accounts, and publish sensitive personal information (aka doxing). Their ultimate goal is to intimidate, discredit, and silence journalists and undermine press freedom. But there are concrete steps each of us can take to protect ourselves and fight back.

This series will include eight short video episodes and four virtual workshops, when you can follow along to complete your digital wellness check, ask questions, and get help if you get stuck. You can join one, two or all four sessions.

Check out the full schedule and all of the episodes at pen.org/event-series/digital-safety-snacks.

Workshop Topics:

• Thursday, June 16: deDox Yourself: Learn how to protect yourself from doxing—the publishing of private personal information, like your home address or cell phone, without your consent.
• Thursday, June 30: Anti-Hackathon: Learn to protect yourself from hacking—someone breaking into your account or device to steal your data, impersonate you, or surveil you.
• Thursday, July 14: Secure Your Twitter and Facebook Accounts: By tightening your privacy and security settings on Facebook and Twitter, you can limit how much data you’re leaking without your consent.
• Thursday, July 25: Don’t Forget Insta, LinkedIn, and Cell Phone Hygiene: For many of us, those are our weakest links.