Anti-Defamation League survey: 37% of Americans say they have experienced severe online harassment, including stalking and physical threats, in 2018
Issie Lapowsky / Wired :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2019 Anti-Defamation League survey set the baseline for a measurement series the group has kept running: its 2023 follow-up found harassment had climbed to 33% of adults and 51% of teens, up from 23% and 36% a year earlier. The 37% severe-harassment figure here — stalking and physical threats, not just name-calling — is what made later comparisons meaningful.
It also landed mid-arc on platform accountability: months later a report put gamer harassment far higher at 74% experiencing some form and 65% severe, while CCDH's study of abusive DMs showed Instagram acting on only 10% of reported messages. Germany's experience with a tough abuse law that failed to clean up its networks framed the policy debate this data fed.
First-order effects
- Platforms like Twitter and Instagram face direct evidence their moderation is missing severe harm — threats and stalking, not just offensive speech — giving advocacy groups like the ADL concrete numbers to demand enforcement against.
- US lawmakers get a quantified constituency: with 37% of adults reporting severe harassment, the issue shifts from niche complaint to mass-market problem in any hearing on platform liability.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers and brand-safety buyers gain an independent severity metric to pressure platforms with, complementing internal transparency reports that self-report the numbers.
- Regulators abroad get a cautionary template: Germany's already-passed abuse law did not clear harassment from its networks ahead of its election, so copycat legislation alone looks insufficient without enforcement teeth.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — ADL's own series later showed adult harassment rising from 23% to 33% between 2022 and 2023 — repeated independent surveys become the de facto audit layer for online safety, filling the gap left by platforms' selective transparency.
- The research linking hate-speech spikes on Twitter to subsequent physical attacks points toward regulators treating online harassment as a public-safety metric rather than a content-moderation nicety, raising the stakes of enforcement failures.
The trend: Independent advocacy-group surveys are hardening into the standard yardstick for online harassment, forcing platforms and regulators to answer for severity levels their own reports understate.