Hello, I have written down my story and will start sharing it on social media platforms to get some help.
I hope to share it with you first and get any feedback on possible resources that you all know of to detect this issue.
My Social Media Horror Story : Electronic Abuse & Stalking
My name is Erica and I am here to talk about my story of harassment and electronic abuse.
I have been a victim of internet stalking and harassment for the past couple years and it has just now escalated to this point and that is why I am telling this story.
For starters, people reading this need to know that I am a college educated, 29 year old woman who has never had an interest in internet stardom, fame or the entertainment industry, not that any of those things are bad, I just have never pursued those things.
A second thing that I want everyone to know is that to understand this story you need to know the basics about technology and how social media technologies work.
Thirdly, to understand the most gruesome part of this story you need to be able to understand a bit of physics, engineering, and neurology.
Let me start with the social media. As many of you know, your social media accounts developed by facebook are connected to almost everything else you do online. Your buying habits, your social media friends, your email, basically everything that you do online and sometimes in person at shopping centers and phone calls are being tracked by the government and these social media companies. This is something at this point that most people are aware of. Next, you need to understand what type of accounts on social media have access to what information. People who have for profit accounts and “official” accounts which are accounts that have a check on them have access to advanced levels of tracking about the people who follow them. In addition, many of the more prominent accounts have access to or own themselves satellites that can do everything from watch you from inside your walls to being able to read your thoughts. This capability is also in cell phones, more on that later.
So how does this apply to me? Well my story starts with simply being a social media member. I had joined Instagram around 2014. I had never used it in college, only Facebook. I had posted pretty sparingly and had maybe 200 followers at the time. This is the part that you really need to be open minded to because it’s going to sound crazy but it is the key to how this abuse has started.
I was in the middle of my graduate experience at Carnegie Mellon for Information Systems and Analytics, ironic I know. While I was there, I was struggling. I was struggling mentally with being in a program that I felt ill prepared for. I often felt lonely because I had left my friends in NY and moved to Pittsburgh in a program that was largely international, that at times made me feel like a foreigner. I love my classmates and I know they go through a lot to be away from their families as well, but I just wanted to be honest about how I was feeling.
Because of this, I tried to be my own “hype man”. I used my social media account as a channel that provided positive words and uplifting messages about perseverance and overcoming adversity. I also followed a lot of mental health accounts such as the good quote and rumi. Also, I started following black empowerment accounts because it was inspirational to see black people achieving great economic things and overcome the obstacles they faced. At the time, Instagram allowed people to see your activity in the form of follows and likes. I noticed my network started watching my activity and seemed to be interested in the things I was liking and following. I started to take that on as an identity sharing and liking posts that helped people see things more positively and also taught some of my peers things they may not have known were achieved by black people.
This is the part that was shocking to me and I am not sure how well known this fact is, but I noticed after that it seemed like “Instagram official” accounts could see my activity and were starting to see me. How? I know, out of the millions of followers they have how did they come upon my activity and start paying attention to what I was posting in stories and liking. This started to weirdly skyrocket as more Instagram official accounts seemed to react to something, it made some of their friends pay attention to my account. Again, all through this process, I had never made my account public so I was very unsure about how this was happening. This was kind of weird but not at all bothersome in any way because, after all, who wouldn’t want to get attention from the accounts that you admire and follow. However, this attention soon turned more personal.
The next thing that happened was that one particular account, and I am not going to say who because I do not want to be accused of slander until I have proof that this is the abuser, but this particular account started try to “talk” to me in non-personal ways. What kind of ways? Well first, this account would start posting pictures to their account right when I logged on. Again, most people here would say, its probably an algorithm and I thought the same thing. I dismissed it as a coincidence or an algorithm making it seem like something was happening when it was not real. After this had continued to happen I realized it probably wasn’t a coincidence but nothing made me stop and really feel like they were “trying to talk to me”. Afterwards this account started to post nuggets of things happening in my life into their posts. At this point when I start telling this part of the story most people start asking me if I’m okay, or if all of this was a coincidence. Right now I am thinking, okay, accounts can see your activity, they must be able to listen to you when you’re around your phone, which at this point was revealed by Edward Snowden. I thought, okay as long as I am not around my phone I should still have privacy. Next, a couple more things were happening with my Spotify music. Sometimes the playlist would stop and start, and certain tracks were queued that I had not queued. I was an avid listener of RnB music and though this was strange I saw it as a weird form a flirting that was kind of endearing. So again. I didn’t tell anyone because at this point I thought this was the craziest thing I could have told people, but I also didn’t report it because I didn’t find it harassment. By now, I should give an update to the fact that I had graduated my grad program and was now living in New York City working for a bank in data analytics. I lived in the LES in a complex facing the street.
What happened next, I kept using social media. I was in a stressful job, with student debt and was barely making it so though everything was really invasive, I liked the attention. I felt like it was an escape mechanism and nothing this account did or said about me was mean or degrading so I kept waiting for him to post something and put nuggets of my life in his posts that “nobody else could see or know about” but me and the other accounts that knew who he was talking about.
What happened next, I thought he wanted to meet me. I figured eventually he would call me, or maybe that was against the rules since technically he wasn’t suppose to see this much about me. He started posting pictures of his tour dates and he kept referencing the NYC date. This account would travel around quite often and do a show so this was a signal that he might want to meet me. He referenced an argument I had with my roommates about toilet paper in his post which made me think something is going to happen at his NYC show. Still, I never was contacted so I didn’t act on anything, I just waited for more information about what he was planning to do. The night went by and nothing happened. It was midnight and I went to sleep. Okay, I thought, non of this is real and I guess this is a fun social media game he is playing.
The following day he posted a picture outside of the NYC arena at 2am that insinuated he was waiting out there and I wasn’t “ready for him”. Wait what? I should have been waiting outside of his concert. Some of his friends that I followed made it seem like I wasn’t trying hard enough for such a big celebrity. This is all crazy for me and not something I do. In addition, I didn’t have many friends to talk to about this and nobody saw that this was happening so it was hard to try to act on something you had no proof of and when nobody else had been around to talk about it with.
Feeling like I had done something wrong, I decided to be a bit bolder. I got some of my close friends around me and told them that I think a famous star wants to meet me and I need to do more. I decided to go to his show in upstate New York. This account was making a large effort to get my attention on social media so I thought I needed to show my interest like a fan would. To be honest I knew very little about this person or their work. I followed them mostly because they were a popular account to follow, much like other popular celebrity personalities.
So, I went with my best friend to his show and what happened? Nothing. They did their show like they normally did and said nothing to me. I walked out of the show feeling really stupid and humiliated. For sure, now everyone was going to think I was mad. Nobody is going to believe anything that had happened prior to this and I just didn’t understand why you would go to this length to tease someone to then humiliate them like that. It was actually one of the most hurtful things I had ever experienced. I am not one to put myself out there, I am not a groupie, I don’t belong in that world, and I am skeptical of anything online. I don’t post sexy pictures of myself to get attention, though there is nothing wrong with doing that, but I try to meet people in person because I genuinely feel like my personality is my selling point. I am very aware that I am not an Instagram model so all this at this point was just low and inconsiderate. Why would someone go to this length to hurt someone?
After this I was really mad and I wanted this to stop. I stopped following this account. There were actually two accounts that I was following of this person. The first is the account for the show he hosts, and the other was his personal account. I stopped following the show account because that is what he mainly used to put nuggets of my life with in his “news stories”.
After this I was actually going through a health emergency. I found out that I had a large muscular fibroid around my pelvic area that had the appearance of being pregnant. In addition, I had a breast lump that I had known about for a while but I wasn’t sure if these were related. I was in a state of panic, and weirdly around the same time COVID-19 was just starting to happen. I could not deal with both of these issues in NY so I decided to move back home to Texas.
Once I moved back to Texas, I was still on social media. I had blocked his Instagram account, and now most of his tactics moved to Youtube. He would reference things about me, calling me Meghan Markle and saying that I should be more of a Beyonce. He would put in references to my surgery by adding snippets in his posts about my large stomach. He also at times would reference my breasts with some edits he would make to his posts. He would also keep making this reference that there was “so much news, but so little time”. This was something he would use to mock me about how I was getting older and it would be hard to have kids. His peers took it as again that he was making efforts to get me to try harder to “get his attention”. There was an overlying assumption that I needed to work out and “get prettier” for him since he clearly wanted my attention but I wasn’t pretty enough for him to publicly talk to me. He would also reference my facial structure by posting videos where his face was turned to the side insinuating that my profile picture was not that pretty only when I looked straight into the camera. All this was happening, mind you, while I was going through a cancer scare. I mean, seriously? At this point, I still believed that maybe his tactics where just a push for urgency and not out of malice. So, I went through my surgeries and tried to diet and exercise. Fortunately, I found out that my conditions were not related and were benign lumps so I was able to get back to exercising. In addition, another major event was happening at the time and that was the George Floyd event. Since I was going through my surgery I was not involved in any protests, and at that time I also was trying to get off of social media in order to stop this “double life” I was living. I was having real conversations with my family just as the rest of the world was but anything I said or might have not known about the issue was immediately attacked. I did not like this attention at all anymore. I did not like the fact that his “love notes” seemed be getting meaner and more like harassment. I was starting to feel like I was just a punching bag for him. This was all a game. Meanwhile his social media accounts were surging in the amount of attention they were getting from the whole ordeal. I felt like I was just being used in multiple ways. Whenever he referenced things about me he also would start wearing a burnt orange hoodie because I went to the University of Texas for undergrad.
Now this is toward the end of last year. I was done with my surgeries; the riots were starting to subside and I had stopped watching any of his social media. He then moved to manipulating my devices. He had been meddling with them a bit the whole time, but now it was very frequent. He would blink in and out my TV and stop my wifi, usually in moments when I really needed it, for instance right before I needed to send an important report for my job. He would stop some of my communication on my phone from sending, and would drop my calls while I was talking to friends and family. He continued to mess with my music and he would jack up my sound to the highest point while I was listening to music and it would be stuck there to where I couldn’t listen to it in my earphones anymore. I started doing full scale learning of how to erase my digital footprint online and secure my devices. I knew a little bit from my graduate program but I studied more of the math, not the technology so it was large feat to try to learn on my own. I started to understand that our devices participate in the internet of things and thus can be accessed quite quickly by accessing your home networks. This brings me to the new year where I was completely done with interacting and being the punching bag of this person. I was trying to figure out a plan to secure my technologies and started telling my family members that this was happening to me. My job had also just gone through layoffs in February of 2021 so I was officially done with all of this. I had given all my attention to this, neglecting my job, had been harassed and trolled online from official accounts on multiple platforms and I was just done. I needed to focus full time on getting another job and securing all of my technology, however, this was just the beginning of how far he would take this.
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While I was awake and sleeping I would feel almost like my head was being pushed and pulled.
I would get really foggy and dizzy and sometimes I would fall over from the pressure. I kept thinking what is this? It was not all the time, but as soon as I sat still it soon came back. I would feel something almost like magnets and hear wavelengths in my ears like an ebb and flow. I looked up the ability to read thoughts and surprisingly there was a lot of communication out there about technology that could easily do this. That’s creepy and very invasive, but what got to be a new level of harassment was that this abuser was starting to influence my dreams. There were times when he would introduce male characters in my dreams and make me do sexual things that actually happened to me. I didn’t understand anything about how this was possible but I had a lot going on so I tried to ignore it and focus on my new job and the many responsibilities I had going on. Later on, however, I noticed this activity becoming more frequent. This was accompanied by crawling in my head that felt like someone was peering around and looking through the tissues of my brain. This is when this became a full on abuse story, as this person was starting to scan parts of my brain and trigger neurons in order to “trick” my body into thinking something was happening. This brought severe pain throughout my body, muscle tension, hypertension in my lungs and bowel indigestion. Basically, everything your brain triggers could be influenced by this person firing off neurons in your brain. I later did some research and found that this has been going on since the 40s, as usually a way to torture adversaries. But OMG why is this person doing this to me. Why would anyone go to this level to hurt someone. What kind of evil to you have to be to keep doing it.
I am still in the process of trying to find someone who can help me detect what technology he is using to do this. This is why I have turned to social media because I genuinely don’t know where else to go for help. This is an issue that unfortunately impacted me out of a billion people but honestly it could happen to anyone and it probably will increase in the coming years as technology and resources become cheaper and more easily hackable. I am asking for anyone that might know about this subject matter area to please help me. I have also found a community of people who have been subject to electronic abuse and found that this community is home to an astounding 4000 people already. This is being done to so many, and it’s being done in silence.
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