Friend Requests Research Articles

The Role of Social Media in Promoting Inclusive Communication between the Non-Disabled and People with Disabilities through Accessibility Features

The study sought to establish whether social media can promote inclusive communication between people with disabilities and those without through accessible features in Saudi Arabia. Two areas of interest in the study were inclusivity and accessibility of social media features. People with disabilities must be included in the online space and have access to features that enable them to communicate easily. Social media communication can be sending a friend request, chatting, or responding to people's posts. The study engaged a self-report of 154 participants of varied levels of education and age groups, including gender, different provinces around the country, and the social media platforms they preferred. The descriptive and inferential analyses show that social media platforms can promote inclusive communication if accessible features are available. Accessible features include alt text, a simple user interface, hashtags, emoticons, and captions.

Risky online behaviors and cybercrime awareness among undergraduate students at Al Quds University: a cross sectional study

The rate of cybercrime among Palestinian university students is unknown. This study is the first to examine cybercrime awareness among Palestinian undergraduate students. A cross-sectional design was used to investigate cybercrime awareness, risky online behaviors, and the prevalence of cybercrime among these students. Participants were selected using convenience sampling. Invitations were sent via Google Forms to complete an online questionnaire. The findings revealed that a sizable proportion of participants (52.4%) had either been victims of cybercrime or knew someone who had. High-risk online behaviors included using social media for social interaction, using mobile apps, engaging in excessive social media use, and failing to report criminal activity to law enforcement authorities. The study found a lack of awareness about cybercrime, particularly regarding knowledge, perceived causes, cybersecurity measures, and emotional responses. Multivariate logistic regression analysis identified significant relationships between cybercrime exposure and factors such as students' knowledge of cyberstalking and cybercrime harassment, perceptions of being threatened by cybercrime, the need for university cybercrime awareness programs, and experiences with sextortion, social media harassment, and cyberstalking. Accepting friend requests only from known individuals could reduce their vulnerability to cybercrime. Fear and indifference decreased the likelihood of being exposed to cybercrime, while anger increased the risk. Thus, incorporating cybercrime awareness program, which includes information security awareness, education, and training, into universities' overall security management strategies is critical. This will effectively reduce the risks associated with cyberattacks for students.

Comparison of School-Attending Adolescent Areca Nut Users with Tobacco-Only Users and Those Using Both Substances on Demographic Variables and Behavioral Determinants.

Consumption of areca nut and tobacco, often initiated in adolescence, are important causes of oral cancers in India. Areca nut prevention, often subsumed into school tobacco prevention programs, assumes that users are similar. However, differences in gender or age of users could necessitate unique approaches. The study aimed to find if adolescent areca nut-only users are different from tobacco-only users and users of both areca and tobacco. A cross-sectional survey with school-students attending grades 7, 8, 9 was used to compare differences in age, gender, knowledge, and attitudes among areca nut only users, tobacco-only, users of both, and non-users. Of 1909 respondents, 464 (24.3%) used only areca nut, 25 (1.3%) used only tobacco, 177 (9.3%) used both, and 1243 (65.1%) were never-users. Females, overwhelmingly, consumed only areca nut. Users of both substances, in greater proportions, were male, older in age, and more than half believed that tobacco-users had more friends. A third of tobacco-only and users of both substances found it hard to turn down a friend's request to use compared to a fifth of areca-only and non-users. Differences in gender, age, and behavioral determinants such as subjective norms and perceived behavioral control between the different types of users underlines the need for prevention and cessation programs and policies that are specific to and tailored to their unique profiles and needs.

Wind Chat: Robust & Dynamic Flutter Messaging Application

"Wind Chat" is an Android messaging application developed using Flutter and Google Firebase. It enables users to sign in with their Gmail accounts, send friend requests, and engage in real-time messaging. It is a robust messaging application developed using cutting-edge technologies - Flutter and Google Firebase. Flutter, an open-source UI software development toolkit, allows for the creation of natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. Its expressive and flexible framework ensures a seamless user experience across various platforms. Complementing Flutter, Google Firebase serves as the backend infrastructure, providing a suite of powerful tools for authentication, real-time database management, and cloud storage. Firebase Authentication ensures secure user sign-ins through various methods, while Firebase Real time Database facilitates dynamic and synchronized data updates in real-time. Additionally, Firebase Cloud Storage caters to the reliable storage of multimedia content, a pivotal aspect of Wind Chat's functionality. This integration ensures secure and efficient user authentication and authorization, while also enabling dynamic and responsive data handling, critical for a real-time messaging application like Wind Chat. The combination of Flutter and Firebase empowers "Wind Chat" with a compelling and dynamic user interface, ensuring fluid navigation and an intuitive messaging experience. This fusion of innovative technologies underpins Wind Chat's ability to deliver a feature-rich and user-centric platform for seamless communication.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND ETHICAL LIMITATIONS TO MALAYSIAN JUDICIARY

The use of social media is widely accepted as an important tool to spread information easily and quickly. Judges must read and share opinions towards current and latest information using social media. As such, compliance with the adoption and exchange of information through the responsible use of social media for joint discussions is expected from judges and judicial members. The public confidence in the judicial system will diminish if the judges display improper online conduct. Therefore, the objective of this article is to identify the ethical limitation of the judges’ capacity in using social media for the maintenance of judicial integrity. By summarizing and reviewing the existing relevant framework, this article proposes a persistent and reasonable guideline on the use of social media for the judiciary following the growing risks posed by social media. Furthermore, judges and judicial officers might better exercise extreme care while requesting and accepting friend requests, including social media postings to avoid the manifestation of safety. Local judicial ethics advisory opinions are needed to prepare revised guidelines following the changing social media features.

USE ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS TO IDENTIFY FAKE PROFILES X_0005

we use machine learning, namely an artificial neural network to determine what are the chances that Facebook friend request is authentic or not. We also outline the classes and libraries involved. Furthermore, we discuss the sigmoid function and how the weights are determined and used. Finally, we consider the parameters of the social network page which are utmost important in the provided solution. The other dangers of personal data being obtained for fraudulent purposes is the presence of bots and fake profiles. Bots are programs that can gather information about the user without the user even knowing. This process is known as web scraping. What is worse, is that this action is legal. Bots can be hidden or come in the form of a fake friend request on a social network site to gain access to private information. In 2017 Facebook reached a total population of 2.46 billion users making it the most popular choice of social media [1]. Social media networks make revenues from the data provided by users. The average user does not know that their rights are given up the moment they use the social media network's service. Social media companies have a lot to gain at the expense of the user. Every time a user shares a new location, new photos, likes, dislikes, and tag other users in content posted, Facebook makes revenue via advertisements and data. More specifically, the average American user generates about $26.76 per quarter [2]. That number adds up quickly when millions of users are involved. In today's digital age, the ever-increasing dependency on computer technology has left the average citizen vulnerable to crimes such as data breaches and possible identity theft. These attacks can occur without notice and often without notification to the victims of a data breach. At this time, there is little incentive for social networks to improve their data security. These breaches often target social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter. They can also target banks and other financial institutions.

Learning to bid and rank together in recommendation systems

AbstractMany Internet applications adopt real-time bidding mechanisms to ensure different services (types of content) are shown to the users through fair competitions. The service offering the highest bid price gets the content slot to present a list of items in its candidate pool. Through user interactions with the recommended items, the service obtains the desired engagement activities. We propose a contextual-bandit framework to jointly optimize the price to bid for the slot and the order to rank its candidates for a given service in this type of recommendation systems. Our method can take as input any feature that describes the user and the candidates, including the outputs of other machine learning models. We train reinforcement learning policies using deep neural networks, and compute top-K Gaussian propensity scores to exclude the variance in the gradients caused by randomness unrelated to the reward. This setup further facilitates us to automatically find accurate reward functions that trade off between budget spending and user engagements. In online A/B experiments on two major services of Facebook Home Feed, Groups You Should Join and Friend Requests, our method statistically significantly boosted the number of groups joined by 14.7%, the number of friend requests accepted by 7.0%, and the number of daily active Facebook users by about 1 million, against strong hand-tuned baselines that have been iterated in production over years.

PENDAMPINGAN PENGELOLAAN INSTAGRAM SEBAGAI MEDIA KOMUNIKASI PEMASARAN UMKM GIPANG IKE-KE CILEGON

SMEs Gipang Cassava IKA-KE has been around since 2013, located in the Cilentrang RT. 02/01 No. 126 Purwakarta Village, Purwakarta District, Cilegon. Mrs. Djum'ati as the owner of the IKA-KE Gipang Cassava UMKM said that the background for the establishment of this business was from a friend's request. The response from the first sales was good, Mrs. Djum'ati expanded her business, and started selling the cassava gipang at the puskesmas, village office, and several cooperatives in Krakatau Steel's subsidiary. In 2015 Gipang Cassava IKA-KE won 2nd place in the Banten Province food innovation championship. Already having a turnover of IDR 10,000,000 per month, Gipang Cassava IKA-KE only sells its products around Cilegon and Serang. Gipang Cassava IKA-KE has not succeeded in entering markets outside the two cities. The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-2021, caused IKA_KE's Gipang Cassava sales turnover to decrease by more than 50%. This is because IKA-KE's Gipang Cassava only sells through conventional channels, which during the Covid-19 pandemic limited their operating hours, such as cooperatives and village offices. The method of implementing this community service activity includes preparation, implementation of assistance, as well as evaluation and monitoring. The results of this dedication show positive results. UMKM Gipang Cassava IKA-KE has a social media with 109 followers, which has succeeded in increasing sales by 40%, and also expanding the market to Jakarta and West Java

Perceptions of professional social media interaction with patients and faculty members – a comparative survey among dental students from Malaysia and Finland

BackgroundProfessional and personal boundaries are blurred with the wide application of social media (SM) in the health professions line of work. Little is known about practice of extending friend requests to patients and faculty members among dental students, which encompass a part of E-professionalism. The aim of this study is to assess the factors associated with the perceptions and practices of interactions with patients and faculty on SM among dental students from Malaysia and Finland.MethodsDental students from 4 institutions in Malaysia and Finland completed self-administered questionnaires on the practices and perceptions of SM use. The main variables assessed were the perceptions and practices of student-patient and student-faculty communication on SM, between the two countries. Students’ country, age, gender, time spent on SM and perceived importance of communicating dental related aspects over SM were analysed as potential explanatory variables. Crosstabulation was used to estimate the distributions of the response variables by the background characteristics. Multivariate analyses were performed using a dichotomous logistic regression model to investigate relevant associations between the responses and the explanatory variables independent from other factors.ResultsA total of 643 students completed the survey in March-April 2021. More Malaysian students agreed with “guiding patients online is a new responsibility for dentists in the digital age” compared to Finnish students (86.4% vs. 73.4%). Similarly, significantly more Malaysian students befriended patients (14.1% vs. 1%) and invited faculty to be friends on SM (73.6% vs. 11.8%). Expectedly, clinical year students befriended patients more than pre-clinical (13.8% vs. 6.8%). Significantly more students who felt ‘communication of dental related issues over SM’ were likely to extend friend requests to faculty rather than accept patient friend requests.ConclusionsSocial media regulations and socio-cultural practices contribute to dental students’ attitudes and behaviour when befriending patients and faculty members on social media. Future dental curriculum should incorporate guidelines for professional communication on social media based on local and cultural needs. Students’ should be encouraged to interact with their patients using professional identities on social media.

THE NIGERIAN SCAM 2.0 How an improved online scam trick made an unsuspecting Dutch man over 20,000 euros poorer


 
 
 
 This paper studies a case of Nigerian scam experienced first-hand by its author. On Tuesday July 10, 2018 I received a friend request on Facebook from someone called Robert Batterman, apparently an elderly London lawyer. I didn’t know the man, but I saw that Batterman was also a friend of two of my trusted Dutch Facebook friends at the time, so it seemed fine and I accepted the friend request. Later, I was sent another message via Messenger from this Batterman in Dutch talking about “something important to discuss with you”.
 A Dutch Facebook friend got a similar message, but this time about “the late Alain Schaap”. We both realized that this must be a Nigerian Scam. I decided to find out some more about this British lawyer and posted a warning about this scam on the Internet the next day. Three weeks later I received an e-mail from a Dutch man who told me he saw the warning a little too late. He had already lost a considerable amount of money and was prepared to tell me what happened.
 
 
 

Story Book – A Social Media-based Web Application

In this article, the MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, and Node.js) stack is used to create and deploy a social networking platform. The project’s goal was to provide a feature rich platform with tools for users to share text and images, connect with others via friend requests, engage with postings through likes and comments, and flag offensive material. Additionally, the platform provides options for dark and light viewing modes. In addition to highlighting the important features and functionalities developed, the paper gives an overview of the project’s architecture and goes over user registration, profile setup, post authoring, friend request management, and post engagement. The specifics of the implementation, including the difficulties encountered and fixes used, are covered. The platform’s review reveals its effective operation, user involvement, and responsiveness. The study advances the subject of social media platforms by demonstrating how a MERN based solution may be implemented successfully. The results of this study act as a starting point for future developments in social media platform design.

Sociodemographic Factors, Attitudes, and Tobacco use among Adolescent Areca-Nut Users in Mumbai, India.

Areca nut, initiated in adolescence, is considered a gateway for tobacco use and an important cause of oral cancers in India. This study examined differences in sociodemographic factors, attitudes and beliefs, and tobacco use between current (last 30 days) areca nut users and past users, who have ever used areca but not in the last 30 days. A cross-sectional survey with school students attending grades 7, 8, 9 provided data to compare differences in age, gender, beliefs, attitudes, and concurrent tobacco use among self-reported areca users. Of 1909 participants surveyed, 641 (33.57%) reported use of areca nut; of which 355 (55.38%) current users had consumed it in the last 30 days. A logistic regression model revealed that male gender, using tobacco concurrently, inability to refuse a friend's request to use, and intention to use areca nuts in the next 12 months were significant predictors of current areca use. More research is needed to understand adolescent areca-nut use, including different types of users such as experimenters and those with established habits. This will help design targeted areca-nut prevention and cessation programs.

Social media usage of chinese nursing students: Attitudes, motivations, mental health problems, and self-disclosure.

Excessive self-disclosure online may risk the reputations, mental health problems, and professional lives of nursing students. This study investigated nursing students' usage of social media, their attitudes towards social media, mental health problems and self-disclosures, and the relationships of these variables. A cross-sectional study was conducted online (n = 1054) with questionnaires of Fear of Missing Out (FoMO), Social Media Fatigue (SMF), Students' Uses and Views of Social Media (SUVSM) and self-disclosure in social media which included self-information shown on social media and information viewed by others. Although most of them held positive attitudes towards social media, 17.4% of the participants acknowledged that they had posted inappropriate contents online and 37.6% witnessed improper posts from schoolmates or teachers online. SMF was affected by familiar with relevant regulations on the social media usage (β = -.10, p < .001), FoMO (β = .41, p < .001), and SUVSM (β = .17, p < .001). Additionally, nearly 1/3 participants reported their net-friends could view following information: gender, age, occupation, education level and location. Self- disclosure in social media was positively influenced by education (β = .10, p < .001), sharing moments or Weibo, etc. (β = .009, P = 0.009), time spent on social media daily (β = .11, p < .001), accepting stranger's "friend request" (β = .06, P = 0.047), FoMO (β = .14, p < .001) and SMF (β = .19, p < .001). Furthermore, effect of SUVSM on self-disclosure in social media was mediated by FoMO and SMF. Inappropriate contents are posted and witnessed by appreciable proportions of nursing students. Positive attitude towards social media may strengthen FoMO and SMF, which may increase self-disclosure in social media in turn.

Attitudes of doctors of medicine and dental medicine towards contacting patients via social networks

Abstract Background As the use of social networking sites (SNSs) has greatly increased among health professionals, it is necessary to investigate their use of SNSs. The aim of this study was to identify the patterns of SNS use for contact with patients between medical doctors (MD) and doctors of dental medicine (DMD) in Croatia. Methods In collaboration with the Croatian Medical Chamber and the Croatian Chamber of Dental Medicine, a quantitative cross-sectional study was conducted on the use of SNSs and the attitudes of MDs and DMDs towards e-professionalism. Data were collected using online questionnaires. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results A total of 753 responses were processed, 507 (67,3%) MDs and 246 (32,7%) DMDs. DMDs were significantly more likely to visit patients or their family members’ profiles on SNSs (60,6% vs 33,3%, P &amp;lt; 0.001). The main reason for visiting a patient’s or family member’s profile is social communication, which is significantly more common among DMDs (46,3% vs 29,0%, P &amp;lt; 0.002). DMDs are significantly more likely to send friend requests from private SNS profiles to patients or their family members (15,0% DMDs vs 3,4% MDs, P &amp;lt; 0.001). Patients are much more likely to send friendship and connection requests on SNS to DMDs (91,1% DMDs vs 62,7% MDs, P &amp;lt; 0.001) who are also significantly more likely to accept these requests (76,8% DMDs vs 41,5% MDs, P &amp;lt; 0.001). MDs and DMDs would find the presence of e-professionalism guidelines useful (72,2% MDS vs 78,0% DMDs, P = 0.103). Conclusions The results show that DMDs are more open to communicating with patients via SNSs. Results showed a difference between MDs and DMDs in both directions - in sending requests to patients or their family members and in positive responses to their requests for connection. The findings point to the need to develop guidelines for health professionals regarding e-professionalism. Key messages • There are differences between MDs and DMDs toward communicating with patients using SNSs, DMDs being more open to the communication with patients. • There is a need to develop guidelines for health professionals on e-professionalism with emphasis regarding how to professionally communicate with patients on SNSs.

Fake Accounts and Clone Profiles Identification on Social Media Using Machine Learning Algorithms

Fake and Clone profiles are creating dangerous security problems to social network users. Cloning of user profiles is one serious threat, where already existing user’s details are stolen to create duplicate profiles and then it is misused for damaging the identity of original profile owner. They can even launch threats like phishing, stalking, spamming etc. Fake profile is the creation of profile in the name of a person or a company which does not really exist in social media, to carry out malicious activities. In this paper, a detection method has been proposed which can detect Fake and Clone profiles in Twitter. Fake profiles are detected based on number of abuse reports, number of comments per day and number of rejected friend requests, a person who are using fake account. For Profile Cloning detection two Machine Learning algorithms are used. One using Random forest Classification algorithm for classifying the data and Support Vector Machine algorithm. This project has worked with other ML algorithms, those training and testing results are included in this paper.

GraphRR: A multiplex Graph based Reciprocal friend Recommender system with applications on online gaming service

Reciprocal Recommender Systems (RRSs) are recommender systems specifically designed for people-to-people recommendation tasks, e.g., online gaming, dating, and recruitment services. They are fundamentally different from the conventional user–item recommendations. In RRSs, user interactions are usually directional, i.e., they are initiated by one side and not necessarily reciprocated by the other side. In the meanwhile, abundant multiplex user interactions, e.g., Friend Request and Send Message, are collated by the online services and can be represented into a large-scale multiplex user interaction graph. Despite the substantial progress of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on capturing users’ multiplex interactions, naive GNNs are insufficient to capture the additional information implied from the directions of interactions, as they are usually not designed to preserve the asymmetric proximities between users.In the paper, we present a novel Graph neural network for Reciprocal Recommendation (GraphRR) to utilize the multiplex user interactions. Specifically, three ego graphs are augmented based on the directions of interactions for each user to capture his preference, attraction and similarity in a finer granularity. Then the multiplexity-aware GNN modules are further applied to measure the contributions of different interaction types. Extensive experiments are conducted in the datasets of the real-world large-scale online games from NetEase Games, a leading game provider for worldwide users. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of GraphRR over baseline methods and provide empirical evidence for the benefits of the proposed ego graph augmentation. The source code is also available online for reproductivity11https://github.com/changym3/GraphRR..

Exploring Association Between Social Media Addiction, Fear of Missing Out, and Self-Presentation Online Among University Students: A Cross-Sectional Study.

BackgroundSocial media addiction (SMA) is known to be associated with excess use of social media. However, few studies have focused on the links of self-presentation on social media, fear of missing out (FoMO) and SMA. The present study investigated the relationships of self-presentation, FoMO and SMA among university students.MethodsOnline survey was conducted with 2,744 respondents, who completed online survey including social media use, FoMO and SMA. Self-presentation on social media and privacy information protection were assessed via researcher-designed questionnaires. Self-presentation on social media was composed of basic information shown on social media and expression willingness. Privacy information protection contained information viewed by others and privacy settings in social media platforms.ResultsThe most common information posted on social media were gender, hobby, age, personal photos, videos, and birthday. The most common social platforms with privacy setting were QQ zone (62.2%), WeChat (60.1%), and QQ (40.3%). FoMO (OR = 2.852, P = 0.000), information viewed by others (OR = 4.261, P = 0.000), managing a personal homepage (OR = 1.339, P = 0.002), accept a stranger's “friend request” (OR = 1.251, P = 0.028) and undergraduate students and above (OR = 1.439, P = 0.001) predicted expression willingness. FoMO (OR = 5.278, P = 0.000), information viewed by others (OR = 9.673, P = 0.000), privacy setting in QQ (OR = 0.817, P = 0.002) and in Tik Tok (OR = 0.536, P = 0.019) and female (OR = 0.588, P = 0.004) significantly influenced basic information shown on social media. Furthermore, FoMO (OR = 4.165, P = 0.000), expression willingness (OR = 1.645, P = 0.000), and information viewed by others (OR = 1.406, P = 0.000) positively affected the level of SMA. Risk of SMA increased as time spent on social media per day. However, basic information shown on social media did not significantly influence SMA.ConclusionIn general, students with higher level of FoMO and expression willingness are more likely to experience SMA. These results highlight individual behaviors on social media should be considered as essential elements for assessing problematic engaging to social media.

DETECTING UNAUTHORIZED OR FRAUD PROFILES USING ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS

In moment's digital age, the ever- adding reliance on computer technology has left the average citizen vulnerable to crimes similar as data breaches and possible identity theft. These attacks can do without notice and frequently without announcement to the victims of a data breach. At this time, there's little provocation for social networks to ameliorate their data security. These breaches frequently target social media networks similar as Face book, Twitter, Instagram and many other platforms. They can also target banks and other fiscal institutions. Vicious users’ produce fake accounts to phish login information from unknowing users. A fake profile will shoot friend requests to numerous users’ with public profiles. These fraud account users bait unknowing genuine users with film land of people that are considered seductive. Once the person accepts the request, the fake user of the phony profile will spam friend requests to anyone this person is a friend. Then, by using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) we're relating whether given account details are from genuine or fake users’. ANN algorithm will be trained with all former users’ fake and genuine account data and also whenever we gave a new test data then that ANN train model will be applied on new test data to identify whether given new account details are from genuine or fake accounts. Online social networks similar as Face book or Twitter contain users’ details and some vicious users’ will hack social network database to steal or transgress genuine user’s information, to cover users’ data we're using ANN Algorithm. To train ANN algorithm we're using below details from social networks. Age of Account, User gender, Age of user, Profile link description, Usage count, Friends or followers count, Position, Location IP address, Status.

User behavior-based and graph-based hybrid approach for detection of Sybil Attack in online social networks

The immense popularity of social networks has rendered them vulnerable to security threats such as Sybil attacks. In Sybil attacks, attackers send several friend requests from fake identities, and some of the genuine users might accept them unknowingly and become victims of Sybil attacks. Once genuine users accept friend requests from Sybil identities, attackers can spam, phish, and conduct other harmful actions in the target networks. Though genuine users have links to Sybil users unknowingly, they do less interaction and have low strength of relationship with them. Thus, the relationship strength measure can be useful to detect a Sybil attack. Considering the relationship strength measure, we propose a behavior-based and graph-based hybrid approach to detect a Sybil attack in Online Social Networks (OSNs). We identify the behavior features, use them to measure the relationship strength, and identify attack edges. We use the graph-based feature(betweenness-centrality) to leverage attack-edge identification and detect Sybil nodes. We have evaluated our scheme using real-world datasets, and experimental results validate the proposed scheme’s effectiveness.

How to Handle Online Harassment, Cyberstalking by Patients

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Government & LegalFull AccessHow to Handle Online Harassment, Cyberstalking by PatientsAllison M. Funicelli, M.P.A., C.C.L.A., A.R.M.Allison M. FunicelliSearch for more papers by this author, M.P.A., C.C.L.A., A.R.M.Published Online:27 Oct 2021https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2021.11.31AbstractDon’t hesitate to take action if a patient engages in harassing online behavior.Several studies have concluded that as many as 75% of workplace assaults and violent attacks occur in health care settings. Furthermore, as many as 20% of physicians surveyed reported being the victim of at least one instance of stalking or harassment by a patient.Unfortunately, predicting who may exhibit this type of behavior is difficult. In addition, the internet allows perpetrators to harass their victims, such as health care professionals, more frequently, easily, and anonymously than ever before. Both male and female physicians report stalking events with almost the same frequency. Mental illness and fear are two of the top reasons cited as why patients act out against their health care professionals. Transference is another potential cause for cyberstalking and harassing behavior; a patient may redirect some of his/her feelings for others onto the psychiatrist, enhancing their need to interact with his/her psychiatrist in unhealthy ways.Online harassment is defined as using online media (such as social media platforms, websites, apps, emails, and text) to cause emotional distress to an intended victim. Cyberstalking is the repeated use of electronic communications to harass or frighten someone, for example, by sending threatening emails. APA has a resource document that addresses stalking, intrusive behaviors, and related phenomena by patients (see link below). It provides key information related to personal safety, prevention, and intervention. Depending on the level of threat, psychiatrists may need to seek personal counseling to deal with the stress of being harassed or intimidated by a patient and determine if the patient requires hospitalization or transfer of care to another psychiatrist. Moreover, consider if there is a duty to warn others who may be in danger. It may be important to inform staff members if there is a credible threat to their safety as well.Maintain clear boundaries with patients. Do not accept friend requests on social media platforms.Maintain professionalism to avoid blurred lines in the doctor/patient relationship.Report threatening behavior to law enforcement; consider filing a civil protection order for stalking behavior.Provide the minimum necessary information to law enforcement/court to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).Document the details of the event both in the patient’s medical record and in your personal records.Block the telephone number of the harasser and/or change your personal telephone number if necessary.Contact patients through HIPAA-compliant privacy apps or a patient portal that encrypts your telephone number and email address.Use separate cell phone numbers and email addresses for work and personal use.Dismiss the patient from the practice if necessary. Follow proper termination procedures.Consider safety precautions such as panic buttons installed in the office, protective barriers where possible (patient session rooms, waiting areas, private staff areas), and other security measures.Consult your risk management professional or practice attorney for guidance. ■This information is provided as a risk management resource for Allied World policyholders and should not be construed as legal or clinical advice. This material may not be reproduced or distributed without the express, written permission of Allied World Assurance Company Holdings Ltd, a Fairfax company (“Allied World”). Risk management services are provided by or arranged through AWAC Services Company, a member company of Allied World. © 2021 Allied World Assurance Company Holdings, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.APA’s “Resource Document on Stalking, Intrusive Behaviors, and Related Phenomena by Patients” is posted here.Allison M. Funicelli, M.P.A., C.C.L.A., A.R.M., is a risk management consultant in the Risk Management Group of AWAC Services Company, a member company of Allied World. Risk management services are provided as an exclusive benefit to insureds of the APA-endorsed American Professional Agency Inc. liability insurance program. ISSUES NewArchived