Social media checklist

This checklist will help you think about how you can use social media more safely, so you can stay connected to trusted friends, family and support networks.

The following tips are for anyone who is experiencing tech abuse as part of domestic and family violence. There is also an online safety checklist and a checklist for friends and family.

eSafety has legal powers to help protect people who live in Australia from the most serious online abuse and harmful content. 

You can report tech abuse such as cyberstalking to eSafety if it meets the threshold for one of the regulatory schemes that allow us to have seriously harmful content removed.

If you are affected by technology-facilitated abuse you can help to protect yourself by

Checking the privacy settings for all online accounts, including children’s accounts. For more information about privacy settings in individual social media services see the eSafety Guide.

Checking settings regularly — updates to software and platforms can sometimes change the way privacy settings work, making posts more public than expected.

Being careful who to accept as a friend online and thinking about what your friends can share. ‘Friends’ (and also ‘followers’ of any pages you might run) can take screenshots of posts or save photos and videos and share them with others — even when you think they are private.

Setting personal rules about what to post. This could include avoiding posting anything that might put you at risk, affect your reputation or be used against you or your family, especially in court proceedings. 

What might your personal rules for using social media look like

• Enabling multi-factor authentication (also called two-step authentication), a security feature that will help protect your account in addition to your password.
  Not posting personal informationdetails such as your address, email address, phone number and birthdate.
  Thinking about avoiding using your full legal name, where possible.
• Not adding hashtags to anything you do not want to become public.
• Disabling location services on all your, and your children’s, devices.
• Asking friends and family not to check you or your children in, ‘tag’ them or post anything about you publicly.
• Changing settings in order to prevent others tagging you or checking you or your children in without your approval.