Avoid relying on a social networking site as a primary host for your content, contacts, or other information.

Consider what you would lose access to if your government blocked a site or app. It is easy for governments to block access to social media within their boundaries if they object to what people are sharing. Social media services may also decide to remove objectionable content themselves, rather than face censorship in a particular country.

Social media might also remove content that they believe violates their policies about, for example, violent images or harassment. It is often difficult for them to understand the local context of what users have posted, particularly if it is not in English.

Some people maintain social media accounts with fake names, or one account with their actual name and one with a fake name, to ensure they can organize and connect with others with less risk to their free speech, safety, or liberty.

Email addresses provide one of the easiest ways to search for you: you need to provide one each time you set up a new account. If you really need to hide your identity, it is best to start over with a new social media account which you do not connect to your old accounts or to existing email addresses.

Your phone number can be easily used to look you up and identify you. Consider whether your local law enforcement might make a legal request to social media companies to find the activity associated with your account, or whether someone seeking to harass or find you might make use of your number.

Social media often ensure they will gain in popularity by by using the contact lists in your devices and email accounts to find and recommend more people you might want to connect to. This can have dangerous effects when you want to keep your contacts hidden from others. Consider whether law enforcement in your area might use these contact lists to build a case against you and your colleagues if they confiscated your device or accessed your account. Or consider what might happen if social media revealed information about others you associate with to the public. If these are concerns for you, limit social media apps and sites' permissions to use your contacts.

This is something everyone should think about, regardless of their risk level. Social media sites have developed processes to handle situations where someone passes away or is seriously ill or jailed and others need to manage their account. Designating someone to care for your account can ensure others are notified of your situation, and prevent malicious people from defacing or hacking your account.

Your accounts use an email address and/or a phone number to help recover your account in case of authentication issue. The email address is also used to inform the user of any security related event. It is important to check this information to be sure that an attacker did not change them to gain control of your account later.

See our guide to passwords and other login protections for more on why and how to set up multifactor authentication, sometimes known as 2FA or MFA.

Having verification codes written down or printed out gives you another way to get back into your account if you lose access. If you are traveling, this can be especially useful when you need to get into your accounts and may not have access to wifi or cellular data to use other multifactor authentication.

Governments, police, domestic abusers, and other adversaries may find ways to watch your accounts by logging in from their devices. If they do so, it is possible you will be able to see it from these pages where social media services show which devices have been used to log into your accounts.

If you suspect your account may be watched, or your adversaries may break into it, use this feature of social media accounts to be notified right away when it happens.

If you suspect someone has intruded on your device, you might want to download all records of activity on your account, so you or your technical support person can look for unusual activity.

If you are worried about someone finding you and doing you physical harm, stop your accounts from storing your location information. Turning off location services on your device also makes your mobile device's battery charge last longer.

What you share could put yourself or others at risk. Get in the habit of seeking consent before posting about others, where possible. You may want to work with your colleagues to set guidelines for what you will and won't share publicly, under what conditions.

Photos and videos can reveal a lot of information unintentionally, particularly what is in the background. Many cameras also embed hidden data (metadata or EXIF tags) about the location, date, and time the photo was taken, the camera that took the photo, etc. Social media may publish this information when you upload photos or video.

In some cases, replies to posts have been used to build false claims of human rights defenders associating with people they did not actually associate with. Replies can also be used to harass you. Controlling who can reply can help lower your stress levels.

When you join or start a community or group online it is revealing something about you to others. People may assume that you support or agree with what the group is saying or doing, which could make you vulnerable if you are seen to align yourself with particular political groups, for example. In some countries, connections on social media to individuals or groups have been used in court to make a case against someone, even when the two people were only loosely connected.

If you set up a group and people choose to join it, consider: what are they announcing to the world by doing so? For example, if it is a LGBTQI support group, will that affiliation bring dangers for members in your region? Consider the impact of visibility in your current moment. There may be times when it is valuable for your movement to be visible, and even at that moment people who want your support might need a way to connect with your group without being identified. Think strategically about the platforms where you create your groups, what you name them (would a coded name help, as it did the Mattachine Society or the Daughters of Bilitis gay and lesbian organizations in the 1950s?), and whether they are public or private.

If you join a large group with members that you don't know, be aware that adversaries might also join groups or make connections to identify you or your colleagues, get a better view of what you are doing, or even build false trust. If you suspect this is likely to happen, it is important to choose connections and post selectively when you make an account connected to your work.

Limiting who can contact you can lessen the likelihood that you will be found when you are trying to be private, or targeted by people trying to falsely gain your trust or the trust of your network. This can also be useful if you are being harassed in non-public messages.

There is a possibility governments or police forces might buy advertising data from social media companies to target you and your network with disinformation, or try to find you.

Social media sites may give your information, including information you were trying to keep private, to governments or law enforcement if requested. Look through the following links to learn more about the conditions under which they will do so.

Social media have unfortunately become a favorite method of harassment and disinformation worldwide. If you see malicious impersonation, hashtags being flooded, disinformation being spread, or you or your colleagues are being targeted and harassed, you are not alone and there may be help. Review the processes for reporting using the following links.

Some abusers may try to target you by revealing information about where you live or work, your family or friends, or other personal details including images. In many cases you have a right to have this taken down, even if that information is true. Review the following links for information on how to get that information removed.

Some harassment and disinformation is posted through automated means, rather than by individual people. If you suspect that you are seeing this "coordinated inauthentic activity," you can report it to the social media sites and they may ban those automated systems. While automation can be hard to prove, there are some cases in which reporting coordinated inauthentic activity might be more successful than reporting harassment, if you suspect the social media site will not understand the context of the harassment.

Impersonation in the form of parody is usually accepted as free speech by most social media platforms, and will not be removed. However, impersonation for the purposes of defamation of character may not be, and you can report it.

Any of us may find some content more distressing than other people do, whether it be information on the death of a friend, public arguments which devalue us because of who we are, or frightening events in the news. If you need a break from this stress, here are some tools which can help hide content you do not wish to see, for as long as you wish.

For one reason or another, social media sites will sometimes disable an account. Human rights defenders have sometimes had their accounts shut down because they are documenting human rights abuses with violent scenes that violate the social media platforms's policies; because they have been reported by government, police, or other people who disagree with them; or even because the social media platform does not understand their context well enough to make sense of what they are posting. If this happens to you, you can appeal the decision and ask to have your account restored. Review the links below for information on how.

If you want to stop people from posting to your account because you will not be able to access it for a while-- you suspect you may be detained or jailed, or just because you need to take a break!--you may be able to temporarily deactivate your account on some social media. This can be useful if you face harassment or defamation. On other accounts, like email, you may not be able to stop incoming messages, but can set your account to automatically respond that you are away.

It is often unclear what social media will do with your information when you share it. Are they combined with other data to guess things about you? Are they sold to other companies that may share that information even if you did not want it to be shared? Read the End User Licence Agreement and Privacy Policy or Data Use Policy for social media sites to find out.