'This man just started following me': Women are using TikTok to expose real-world harassment, but some say the online abuse they've received as a result is making them regret their choice

• It's becoming increasingly common for women to film harassment as it's happening and post it online.
• Insider spoke to several women whose videos about such incidents gained widespread attention.

It was a regular day in June when 22-year-old Yula Delcore got on a ferry in Larkspur, California, to visit her boyfriend in Santa Rosa.

Delcore described the journey as an "easy-peasy" commute that she makes once a week, but she told Insider that this time, she heard a man calling out from behind her when she got off the ferry. He was following her, she realized.

"I told him, 'Before you even start, I do have a boyfriend, so I'm not really interested,' and he said, 'I don't care,'" she told Insider.

As the man followed and heckled her, she took out her phone.

"He literally made me so uncomfortable to the point where I thought, 'I ought to film this.' No one else was around us, so I thought if something were to happen, I could at least get proof of it," she told Insider.

In recent years, it's become increasingly common to film instances of harassment or discrimination and post them online, especially on TikTok, where they often blow up — as Delcore's did — receiving hundreds of thousands of views.

Women told Insider that filming harassment is a response to a long history of women's stories being doubted and belittled; they see it as a way to collect indisputable evidence of their experiences. But gaining attention under such circumstances can have disastrous consequences — many women have faced unprecedented backlash when commenters dismissed their experiences, subjecting them to even greater levels of online abuse.

Experts say the explosive and adverse reactions to these videos show how unstable social media can be when it comes to women's safety. And while posting harassment footage may feel impactful in the moment, more needs to be done to create sustained real-world change.

TikTok makes it easier than ever for women to expose their harassers

Now that nearly everyone has a smartphone, filming troubling encounters has become increasingly common.

"It's like saying, 'Hey, this happens. It happens every day. And now you see it, you can't deny it,'" Laurie Essig, a professor and the director of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Middlebury College, Vermont, told Insider.

Delcore told Insider she decided to post footage of her harassment on TikTok so she could "expose the kind of stuff that us women have to go through all the time," adding that she did not expect many people outside her relatively small following of 43,000 people to see it.

While most of Delcore's previous videos received between 1,000 and 5,000 views, her footage of the incident was viewed more than 530,000 times.

Delcore is not the only woman to gain widespread attention with such a video. Natalie Rose, a 29-year-old fitness trainer, shared a video of a man who followed her while walking in Birmingham, England, this past March.

Rose told Insider she reported the incident to the police but also wanted to post her footage of the man's face on TikTok to warn other women in her area. "I thought that if they saw my video, they could be a little bit more wary and look out for him," she said.

Rose's TikTok received 6 million views, and the unexpected attention quickly became overwhelming.

"A TikTok can go all over the world, and mine did. But I think if you don't expect it to, it can be a little bit of a shock," she said.

TikTok's algorithm recommends content to users based on what they have previously watched, regardless of whether a user is following the creator who posted the content. Videos about harassment are often viewed by hundreds of thousands of people under popular tags about the topic. One such hashtag, #safetyforwomen, which Rose used in her video caption, has 124 million TikTok views.

Many women who post these videos risk being discredited and blamed for causing the incident

Some creators told Insider they'd hoped to feel empowered by filming their harassers but found going public had the opposite effect.

Caitlin Wilkinson, 23, filmed a TikTok showing her confronting a man on a subway, who she says was harassing another woman in the car. The man is not visible in the video, as Wilkinson only filmed her own face during the interaction. She told Insider she was worried the man would get "angry" and lash out at her if he realized she was filming him.

The clips garnered more than 2 million views. While the TikTok comments about Wilkinson's videos were overwhelmingly positive, with users praising her for defending the unknown woman, Wilkinson told Insider that she noticed some people posted negative comments about her on Facebook after her TikToks were mentioned in a BuzzFeed news article about her that began to circulate on the platform.

Wilkinson told Insider she read through comments made by Facebook users and saw that many — who she said appeared to be men — were saying the video was staged because she didn't film the perpetrator's face or they thought she was only posting it for views.

"I just felt gaslighted by these guys who didn't believe my side of the story," she said.

Delcore said she was "shocked" to receive comments that defended the unknown man who was following her; these comments — which were seen by Insider — appeared to largely be from male users.

"There were a lot of comments that were like, 'What did this guy do wrong?,' and I was shocked to see so many of them, because I'm obviously uncomfortable in this video," she said.

Other comments seen by Insider appeared to be from men telling her she should have handled the interaction differently. She told Insider she felt they were suggesting the harassment was her fault because she chose to respond to the man's questions instead of ignoring him.

The response to videos portraying harassment can be retraumatizing for victims

Delcore described the online abuse she faced after her video circulated as "retraumatizing," a psychological phenomenon whereby the symptoms experienced after a traumatic experience can reemerge when a new situation carries reminders of the original event.

Delcore said that the flood of skeptical comments she received from men caused her to relive and reprocess her experience with harassment. "For them to tell me nothing happened and nothing was wrong in the video, it was traumatizing, because they're enabling this kind of behavior," she said.

Wilkinson told Insider that the high number of views on her videos, paired with responses from viewers who said they did not believe her account, made her feel anxious to the point where she would not want to post about harassment on TikTok again if she were to witness or experience it.

"Going viral really changed my whole perspective on the internet. I always thought it would be cool, but to get so much hate, it was really confusing for my brain," she said.

Rose told Insider that another source of trauma following her video was the harrowing stories women shared about their own experiences with harassment in the comments.

"It was too much. I had hundreds of messages, and people were sharing all these horrible stories. I guess I opened myself up to that by posting about it, but it just felt like once the comments started, they didn't stop," Rose told Insider.

Delcore told Insider that she feels some people share too much information on social media, a practice sometimes referred to as "trauma dumping."

Kalliopi Mingeirou, the chief of the ending violence against women campaign for UN Women in New York, told Insider that there can often be a "multiplying effect" on social media, where if some women share their stories of harassment, other women begin to step forward, as was the case with the #MeToo movement that also began on social media.

According to Mingeirou, this can create adverse emotional effects when women start to feel responsible for the other women they have inspired to speak out, particularly when these other women are mainly organizing in one person's comments section and replying to her post.

"We cannot expect women to bear the responsibility of sharing their experiences in digital spaces because of all these negative effects which expose them to more violence and trauma through reliving the experiences of other survivors," she said.

These videos alone are unlikely to lead to tangible change

It can be tempting to see this wave of videos calling out sexism and harassment as a route to social change — especially when they gain widespread attention. But it may not be that simple.

Essig told Insider that "circles of support" — where women flood each other's comment sections in an attempt at supporting one another — are also often unlikely to create tangible effects, as sexism remains rife online. There are "rabbit holes on the internet where some young men are amazingly, horrifyingly misogynist," she said.

Essig believes that the most effective way to create social change regarding harassment is to take these conversations off social media and into the real world.

She drew a comparison to the Black Lives Matter movement, which saw a resurgence online after a video of the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020 went viral, which then led to worldwide protests and vows to reform police systems.

"Making videos is a powerful way to get a conversation started, but the conversation has to turn into organized, in-person resistance. Black Lives Matter did not just remain a hashtag," Essig said.

Mingeirou told Insider that women could begin to organize in person by joining or starting local activism groups and taking part in campaigns that lobby governments and lawmakers to put practical measures in place to prevent harassment, such as better street lighting and reporting systems.

This would help take the pressure off of individual women posting their stories of sexual harassment, who would no longer be a spotlighted spokesperson for the issue, but part of a localized effort against harassment, Mingeirou said.

Ultimately, activists are hoping for a future in which solving the problem of harassment is more equally shared between women and men, and between law enforcement, social organizations, and government bodies.

"Sharing stories in online spaces can have consequences that end up putting the survivors in more danger, and survivors need to be aware of that risk," Mingeirou said. "I really feel that we need to take the responsibility off of women to share their stories and place more responsibility on the government to take action against what should not be happening in the first place."

For more stories like this, check out coverage from Insider's Digital Culture team here.