On December 26th, a number of users on the blogging platform Tumblr began receiving anonymous hate messages. The messages ranged from taunting to threats of violence and encouraging individuals to commit suicide. The attacks became so vicious that, as of this writing, 10 people are in the hospital or recovering from self-harm injuries and suicide attempts brought on by this senseless act of bullying -- and Tumblr is not doing anything about it.

The attack--which seems to have been organized by a group of internet trolls on 4chan and 8chan--was at first centered around a specific group of blogs run by fans of the television show Supernatural, but has since spread around Tumblr, with more and more targets every hour. The people behind the attack are focusing on users who have publicly shared struggles with depression and mental illness, and are gleefully preying on these individuals -- even hacking the blogs of users who have attempted suicide, claiming that the owner of the site has died.

These cyberbullies are getting away with this by utilizing Tumblr’s anonymous feature, which disguises the user’s identity and makes it very difficult to stop them from attacking you. Tumblr’s current safety measures to ignore anonymous users are incredibly faulty and do not prevent the same users from viewing your blog or sending you messages. Because of this, Tumblr has become a haven for cyberbullies like these, and it is time we do something about it.

That is why I am asking Tumblr to overhaul their community standards and policies to stop anonymous users like these from terrorizing the Tumblr community, and help assist law enforcement in finding and prosecuting those who make threats of violence.

Please bring them to justice and take preventative actions to ensure this does not happen in the future.