Digital Safety

CW digital threats

I have been thinking about digital safety a lot this week, well for many weeks actually. I have been thinking about how digital safety can or does not play out in the spaces we interact online, whether it be classrooms, meetings, webinars, trainings, social media, or curated community spaces. What I keep coming up with time and again is that sadly, folk who do not live with the need for hypervigilance due to their positionality do not think about digital safety, because concepts of safety rarely appear in their non-online life. So this post is a post about things that you should think of to support safety in digital spaces, told from the perspective, not of an IT professional, but from someone who lives in hypervigilance due to my positionality (and I guarantee you have students who live in that space too).

A few weeks ago the college I teach at asked us to all do a Cybersecurity training thing. I logged in Friday to do it to discover it was a 55min LinkedIn learning almost 98% based on video and the remaining 2% was multiple choice knowledge check questions that ask questions that did not really have any real pertinence to cybersecurity practices. Basically it left me wondering why people don't know instructional designers exist, and why anyone would think that is effective asynchronous learning. But it also left me wondering about how the humanizing angle of digital safety was completely erased from this training and it in fact should have been foundational to what was presented. I understand why it was framed that way, cybersecurity is business, business is money; but also cybersecurity is people, and people's positionality puts them more at risk than others.

When IT sends out a please do this checklist about how to secure a Zoom meeting, I would also wish they would say why it is so important for this to happen. Because when folk end up in your meeting that should not be there, they utter threats, they promote violence, they hurt people. That part is always missing from the guidance, and should be there at the beginning before the click this box, and disable this menu things.

We talk a lot about creating safe spaces in academe, and never in that discussion is there the framing that there is absolutely no way of ensuring a space is safe for everyone, because humans are not robots, and everyone is approaching a space with different lived experiences. However, there are a lot of things that we could start doing and thinking about that could support a safer community space for the exchange of knowledge and experiences. These apply to classroom spaces, conference spaces, meeting spaces, and many other spaces one encounters in academe. Here are the top three:

• Use the security features to make sure your Zoom meeting is being attended by folk who want to be there for constructive (not harmful) reasons. Have registration enabled. Disable sharing of screen for anyone except the presenters. Lock down microphones until the Q&A part. Disable cameras unless they are really necessary for pedagogical reasons.
• Double check the emails of the people you are emailing and make sure that you are not sending personal information to people who should not have that information. Seriously, the amount of things I have seen lately where people are ccing others on information that could inadvertently disclose information about a person or allow them to gain access to a community group is shocking. Check your emails.
• Do not randomly send out emails or tweets with access information to a community space that should be a space for folk who share a lived experience, identity, etc. This is not the gatekeeping point you think it is. This is me saying, stop putting people at risk by sending out join me in this space messages when others have not been given the opportunity to agree if this is something they want to happen.

I know that everyone is tired so therefore the ability to stop and reflect on what we are doing has decreased as the weeks go on. However, those lapses in mindfulness and judgment mean that you are decreasing the digital safety of the space for everyone. For BIPOC, disabled, LGB, Trans folk, and multimarginalized folk this means you have opened this space up to threats. And before you say wait, I don't have any one fitting those descriptors in my space, you do, and no one owes you that disclosure. So please be more aware of how the choices you make can decrease safety for others. If you want to support and promote community, you can choose to let your actions reinforce this, or create more harm. Please pick the first one.