Cyberstalking

Cyberstalking is the offense of using the internet, social media, email, location-tracking technology, or other electronic means to repeatedly harass, monitor, or threaten a specific person in a manner that would cause a reasonable person to fear for their safety or suffer substantial emotional distress, the digital counterpart to traditional stalking and, in many statutes, prosecuted as an aggravated or technologically extended form of the same underlying offense. As with traditional stalking, most cyberstalking statutes require a repeated course of conduct rather than a single unwanted message, and common patterns include persistent unwanted contact across multiple platforms, covert monitoring through spyware or shared location data, and the use of social media to track, publicly harass, or incite others to harass the victim. The offense frequently overlaps with, and can escalate from, related conduct such as online harassment and doxxing, publicly posting a victim's private identifying information to facilitate further harassment or real-world contact, and many statutes and law-enforcement protocols now treat these behaviors as part of a single continuum of technology-facilitated abuse rather than as fully separate offenses. Cyberstalking investigation depends heavily on digital forensics to establish a documented pattern of conduct across accounts, devices, and platforms, and the offense is a significant subject of criminological research into technology-facilitated interpersonal violence, given its documented frequent overlap with domestic violence and its potential, like traditional stalking, to escalate toward physical harm.