Date: February 24, 2026
From: The RISE Information Security Foundation
New Research Explains Why Online Harassment Happens — and Why Understanding It Matters
San Francisco / Global — The RISE Information Security Foundation today announced the release of How Harassment Shaped the Internet: NVEs, Nudifiers, and Networked Aggression, a groundbreaking body of work that reframes online abuse and harassment through the lens of behavioral science, neurochemistry, and social identity theory.
The research was first presented publicly at Team Cymru’s RISE USA conference, held February 18–19, 2026 at Stripe.com’s headquarters in San Francisco, which was attended by 250 senior industry professionals, law enforcement officials, and cybersecurity researchers.
Rather than treating online abuse as a collection of isolated incidents or platform failures, the work situates harassment within well-established models of human behaviour, including mob dynamics, anonymity effects, dopamine-driven reinforcement, and group identity formation. This approach helps explain the persistence, escalation, and normalization of networked aggression across modern digital platforms.
“For too long, online harassment has been treated as aberrant or irrational behaviour,” said Maria Thomas, digital investigator and author of the work. “When we examine it through behavioural science, patterns emerge that allow us to understand motivation, escalation, and group dynamics in a far more coherent and evidence-based way.”
The research traces the historical evolution of online harassment, from early text-based environments and flame wars to contemporary phenomena such as coordinated pile-ons, image-based abuse, nihilistic violent extremist (NVE) networks, and AI-enabled nudification tools. It highlights the ways platform design choices, reward systems, and algorithmic amplification combine with human neurobiology to encourage aggressive behavior at scale.
Crucially, the work argues that better understanding leads directly to better outcomes, not only for prevention and victim support, but for more clear-headed investigations, prosecutions, and sentencing. It also lays the groundwork for further discussion to explore the mitigation of harassment before it starts. By grounding digital harm in observable behavioural mechanisms, investigators and legal practitioners gain clearer frameworks for intent, culpability, and harm assessment.
“If we want clearer, more fair-minded investigations, prosecutions, and mitigation, we have to start with a clearer understanding of behavior,” Thomas added. “Behavioural insight doesn’t excuse harm, it equips us to respond to it with greater precision, consistency, and proportionality.”
This publication is intended for cyber investigators, policy professionals, prosecutors, researchers, and educators seeking a foundational yet operationally relevant framework for addressing online abuse. It emphasizes that while laws and platforms struggle to keep pace with rapidly evolving technologies, behavioural science provides a stable analytical foundation that transcends specific tools or platforms.
Maria Thomas is a digital investigator and researcher at the RISE Information Security Foundation. With a background in behavioural science, she examines online harassment, extremist networks, image-based abuse, and emerging AI-enabled exploitation. Her work bridges behavioural research, cyber investigations, and legal analysis to support clearer prosecutions and proportionate sentencing in digital harm cases.
About The RISE Information Security Foundation
The RISE Information Security Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing global cybersecurity knowledge through expert-led research, training, and public-interest education. RISE focuses on bridging the gap between technical investigation, human behaviour, and policy to improve outcomes across the cybercrime and digital safety ecosystem.
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