RRU researcher to lead national workshop to combat online hate and harassment

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Making the digital world of tomorrow better and safer will take action from more than just government and social media companies - it will also require those of us who witness online abuse to speak up.

That's why Royal Roads University's Dr. Jaigris Hodson is organizing a national workshop on bystander intervention in November 2026, supported by a $34,519 Connection Grant from Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Hodson, Canada Research Chair in Digital Misinformation, Polarization and Anti-social Media, will bring together practitioners, gender-justice advocates, community organizations and academic researchers to co-create three shareable training toolkits aimed at reducing online harassment.

Bystander intervention works

"What we want to do is reach anybody that's working in a space of trying to prevent violence against women, girls and gender-non-conforming people," says Hodson. "They all know, like we do, a bystander intervention can work but they are all also struck by the fact that it's very hard to do."

Indeed, those frequently guilty of online attacks belong to the same demographic as the people who need to step up when they see abusive comments on the social media platform X or threats in Instagram comments: young men.

Stepping up, she says, could include something as simple as standing up to the online bully and letting them know their behaviour is unacceptable.

Young men are the target audience

But getting through to young men is a challenge as many have been influenced by a misogynistic manosphere that perpetuates myths about victims of online harassment and abuse - "She was asking for it" or "She's lying" - that parrot myths about victims of gender-based physical violence.

"Maybe they just simply didn't see online violence as being the same as intervening when you see a physical act of violence out in the world," Hodson explains. "Our research really shows that there are some toxic myths out there that are preventing people from stepping in."

What we want to do is reach anybody that's working in a space of trying to prevent violence against women, girls and gender-non-conforming people.

How to reach those people is the focus of the workshop, which she says could yield a curriculum guide, videos and other training materials for use by anti-violence organizations that are trying to encourage bystander intervention.

Hodson, who is no stranger to the topic, understands she and her collaborators are up against influencers and podcasters with tens or hundreds of millions of followers but she's optimistic about the project's potential.

"We don't have to have billions of ears if we have enough networked anti-violence organizations on the ground, and each one of them has their own community that they speak to," she says. "And we can, I think, move in a bottom-up, grassroots way to reach the people that need to hear this."

The Joe Rogan (misinformation) experience

The people who need to hear these messages are also influenced by the likes of massively popular American podcaster Joe Rogan, whose show Hodson studied earlier this year to show how commodifying communication incentives both misinformation and disinformation (the former is false information spread unknowingly while the latter is known false information spread with intent). She also published a related paper on misinformation that harms targeted groups titled Disinformation by Omission: Discourses of Anti-Trans Disinformation on the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast.

Is your organization interested in learning more? Contact Jaigris Hodson for more details