Academics around the world are increasingly under fire. In January 2025, the American Association of Colleges and Universities published a survey that found that 53% of US faculty members were worried that their work would make them targets of harassment (see go.nature.com/493upmy).
Trolled in science: “Hundreds of hateful comments in a single day”
The Free to Think 2025 report by the Scholars at Risk network described a “global crisis for academic freedom”, documenting 395 attacks on scholars and academic institutions in 49 countries, including the United States and Germany, between 1 July 2024 and 30 June 2025 (see go.nature.com/4jk4cI6).
Now, one year into Donald Trump’s second term as US President, anti-science rhetoric and attacks show no sign of abating — both in the United States and elsewhere. In the United States, the federal government took steps to control university admissions, hiring and free-speech policies. In response to political pressure, individual researchers and entire departments have reported having to purge any mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) from grant applications and websites. The European Parliament conducts an annual Academic Freedom Monitor report; the 2024 version found that “the state of de facto academic freedom across the EU continues to erode”, owing to such forces as changing political systems, intensifying geopolitical tensions and the growing use and impact of social media (see go.nature.com/4subrrf). One blog post by the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin notes that “disinformation researchers across Europe are being sued, harassed and publicly smeared simply for doing their job” (see go.nature.com/4q45auq).
It’s difficult to track how many academics have been targeted. “It’s very under-reported. As a result, these attacks leave people isolated,” says Beck Haberstroh, digital-safety training manager at PEN America, a non-profit organization in New York City that defends free expression. In June 2025, the organization held a workshop to train scientists on how to combat harassment. “Normally, our workshops are 20–50 people; that workshop, we had more than 300,” Haberstroh says. “It’s been an intense year.”
Harassment can take many forms, such as doxxing (maliciously publishing someone’s private or personally identifiable information). Some researchers also receive huge numbers of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which some think are being weaponized to challenge or censor researchers working on politically sensitive topics, by slowing down their work by making them respond to requests, including those asking to see their personal messages. The University of Virginia in Charlottesville reportedly received 849 FOIA requests from 1 January to 5 November 2025 — up from 786 in 2024 (see go.nature.com/48gtnwa).
Students in the United States are also increasingly making surreptitious recordings of lecturers in the classroom and posting them on social media, where the videos can become fodder for politicization.
There are even ‘watch lists’ of allegedly ‘left-leaning’ professors (see go.nature.com/4q6yho2). After the fatal shooting of US conservative activist Charlie Kirk last September, there was an increase in circulating watch lists of faculty members and scholars to target, says Isaac Kamola, who studies the politics of higher education at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. As of early December 2025, David Langkamp, a programme coordinator at the American Association of University Professors in Washington DC, had documented 52 incidents of sanctions — including suspensions and investigations — imposed on faculty members in the wake of Kirk’s death.
Online harassment: a toolkit for protecting yourself from abuse
Researchers working in politically charged areas, or who are active on social media or in public discourse, are on the front lines of harassment and intimidation campaigns. One climate scientist who spoke to Nature on the condition of anonymity has taken a variety of remarkable, unorthodox steps to protect themselves in recent years. Their office location is not shared online and they’ve taken their name off the door. They’ve also set up alerts for their name on the Dark Web, created Google alerts for their name, address and phone number, and moved their climate discussions to the California-based encrypted messaging app, Signal. Their near-term security goal is to pay off their mortgage as soon as possible so that they can list their home in an independent trust to protect their address.
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