From Cyberbullying To Revenge Porn: How Cyber Harassment Crimes And Evidence Have Evolved In Litigation

At Page Vault, we know it’s become vital that legal professionals specializing in cyber harassment understand where the harassment can take place.

Cyber harassment continues to be an area of law that requires litigators to stay on top of quickly evolving social media platforms, websites, blogs, and anonymous forums where online harassment may rear its ugly head. In the early days of the internet, forms of cyber harassment took place within group chat rooms and instant message platforms, such as AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), often by anonymous users.

Now, with the advancements of smart phones and the numerous social media platforms that exploded onto the scene in the 2000s and 2010s, we see an epidemic of cyber harassment that regularly makes news headlines. And because of that, the increased visibility of cyber harassment instances makes it easier for more players to take part in it.

At Page Vault, we know it’s become vital that legal professionals specializing in cyber harassment understand where harassment can take place and that they stay up to date on emerging technologies to know where it may appear in the future.

In a recent interview with cyber harassment litigation attorney, Ruth Carter, she stated, “every time there is a new platform where people can communicate, it provides a new way for people to harass others.” In regards to the prevalence of smartphones, she says that they give people immediate access to these social media platforms where they can post their reactions instantaneously without taking a pause to calm down and rethink their actions.

When litigators are presented with a cyber harassment case, Ruth lays out a few suggestions, such as looking at the details of the claim, knowing how your client wants the situation to end, and most importantly, ensuring you and/or your client document everything related to the harassment.

With cyber harassment, there is an electronic record which makes it easy to discover and document evidence in real time. When evidence is discovered, Ruth advises to quickly capture the content along with metadata like the URL, the date, and any profile information of the person who published the content. That way, if you have to authenticate the record in court, all that information is contained on the screenshot, making it much easier to show a court that the evidence is what you claim it is.

However, as easy as it is for content to be published online, it can just as quickly be deleted. Ruth emphasizes the importance of making sure you capture web content as soon as you see it, even if you may not need it later. As she puts it, “I don’t want to be in a situation where we didn’t get it and now it’s not available.” Archiving websites, like Wayback Machine, are an unreliable source for your online evidence as they only crawl certain websites at certain frequencies. They may be best used to give context of what a website or social media platform looked like in the past if the content was archived, but it wouldn’t be wise to rely on those websites to save or capture your online evidence.

With judges and juries becoming more tech savvy and many states adopting an ethical duty of technology competence, there has been an increase in expectations for what litigators should be able to exhibit. “You better be able to produce a screenshot that shows the court, the jury, and the judge exactly what you are talking about in a way they understand it,” Ruth warns. This includes having documentation with corresponding metadata for all web content related to a case.

Listen to the full interview with Ruth Carter and Page Vault attorney Patrick Schweihs.


Page Vault On Demand™, an easy way for legal professionals to submit a request for web content to be collected, can help to capture discoverable evidence during cyber harassment investigations and more. Each web capture comes with key metadata (IP addresses, time/date stamps, URLs) that further supports the authentication of the content and that can be used as admissible evidence in court. Learn more at www.page-vault.com.