Resilience & Support
A norm names the crime; resilience denies it victims. This page sets out the defensive floor a society should field against psychological operations — and practical, grounded guidance for individuals who fear they may be in someone's sights.
01 · The Societal Floor
Prohibition without capability is a plaque on a wall. Alongside the legal framework, psychosecurity encompasses standing defensive capacity — the equivalent of public health infrastructure for the information environment.
Most counter-disinformation capability watches populations: election interference, narrative campaigns, botnets at scale. Almost none of it watches for coordinated operations against individuals — the tier where decomposition lives. Standing detection capacity means platform-integrity teams, researchers, and civil-society monitors equipped to recognise the signature of a campaign: coordination across accounts, unnatural timing, convergence on one person's relationships and reputation.
A person under coordinated attack today has almost nowhere to take it. Police forces are rarely trained to see a pattern across a hundred individually-minor incidents; clinicians may treat the distress without instruments for assessing its cause; platforms handle each report in isolation. Victim support means attribution assistance, evidence preservation, and clinical referral pathways that take the injury seriously — because the injuries are real and documentable, whatever their source.
Prebunking research demonstrates that populations familiar with manipulation techniques are measurably harder to manipulate with them. This matters doubly for decomposition, because bystanders are the weapon: a smear campaign works only if colleagues believe it, and a manufactured pile-on works only if real people join it. Manipulation literacy is armour for the community around every potential target.
The capabilities that enable decomposition — profiling, synthetic media, persona automation — are mostly commercial products being used as designed, just not as intended. Design safeguards mean building AI systems so that psychological-targeting misuse is harder to do, easier to detect, and costly to attempt: provenance standards, abuse-pattern monitoring, and accountability engineered in rather than bolted on. This is Element 5 of the framework.
02 · For Individuals
Some readers arrive at this site because something in their own life feels wrong. This section is for you, and it begins with honesty: distressing patterns in a life usually have ordinary explanations — coincidence, conflict, bad luck, or a mind under strain, which happens to good and sane people. Coordinated campaigns are real but rare. The steps below are worth taking either way, because they are good practice regardless of cause, and because they replace rumination with method.
Whatever is happening, the distress is real, and it is the thing most worth treating. See a clinician you trust, and tell them everything — including your fear of being disbelieved. Seeking help is not an admission that the pattern is imaginary; it is what a security-minded person does, because chronic fear degrades exactly the judgement you need. The Stasi's files show that inducing this fear, and the isolation that comes from being doubted, was itself the weapon. Do not do the adversary's work for them, real or not.
Keep a dated log of incidents as they happen: what occurred, when, who was involved, how you learned of it. Contemporaneous notes are worth far more — to investigators, lawyers, clinicians, and your own clarity — than recollection assembled later. A pattern, if one exists, becomes visible in a log and stays invisible in memory.
Screenshot abusive or suspicious material together with its URL, date, and account handle before reporting it (reporting often removes it). Save messages, emails with full headers, and voicemails. Do not edit or annotate originals; keep copies in two places. If content concerns you enough to consider legal action, preserve it in a form a third party can verify.
Turn on two-factor authentication everywhere, starting with email; use unique passwords in a password manager; review account-recovery settings and active sessions; keep devices updated. If you suspect device compromise or stalkerware, use a separate, clean device for sensitive matters and consult the specialist resources below rather than guessing.
Responding to provocation supplies material and satisfaction to any real adversary, and deepens distress either way. Likewise, solitary late-night investigation of suspected persecution is corrosive whatever the truth. Work from your log, with other people, in daylight.
Choose one or two people you trust and show them the log. A campaign's goal is isolation; the countermeasure is a witness. A trusted outsider can confirm what is genuinely anomalous, catch what you have missed, and gently flag where strain may be doing the pattern-making — all three are wins.
Report platform abuse to platforms, threats and stalking to police (many jurisdictions' harassment and stalking statutes fit coordinated online campaigns), and press-freedom attacks to the organisations below. Bring the log and the preserved evidence; patterns persuade where anecdotes cannot.
What we can and cannot do. Psychosecurity.ai is a research and policy initiative. We cannot investigate individual cases, attribute attacks, or provide emergency help — and anyone who claims they can do so remotely, for a fee, deserves your scepticism. What we can do is work to build the norms, detection capacity, and support pathways this section describes, so that the next person has somewhere real to turn.
If you are in crisis: contact your local emergency services or a crisis line now — Samaritans 116 123 (UK & Ireland), 988 (US & Canada), or findahelpline.com anywhere in the world. Nothing on this page matters more than that.
03 · Specialist Resources
04 · For Institutions
Newsrooms, universities, research institutes, NGOs, and platforms employ the people most likely to be targeted: journalists, researchers, moderators, and public-facing experts. An institution that benefits from a person's public voice owes them a floor of protection when that voice draws fire:
Questions this page raises are answered at length in the FAQ, including what this initiative can and cannot do for individual cases.