When Technology Becomes a Weapon: What You Need to Know About Cyberstalking and Deepfake Abuse

People like to be casual about it, but cyberstalking is a crime.

Cyberstalking looks like:

• Following you from platform to platform, even after you block them
• Flooding your inbox with unwanted messages
• Watching your posts, tracking your movements, studying your life
• Using fake accounts to get close when you shut the door
• Hacking into your accounts or devices
• Exposing or threatening to expose private information (address, phone number, workplace, etc.) to intimidate or punish.
• Attempting to access someone’s devices, emails, cloud storage, or social profiles without permission.
• Sending threats, implying physical harm, or tracking someone’s location digitally.
• Creating a hostile online environment where you feel unsafe

Cyberstalking also looks like:

• Deepfake porn created without your consent
• Digitally-manipulated images meant to humiliate you
• Threats to share fabricated sexual content with your family, job, or church
• Using sexualized lies to ruin your peace, your relationships, and your reputation

Abusers and bullies have new tactics and tools now. It isn’t just AI, though AI has put some speed on it.  The tools came with consumer access to the internet.

Today, danger can slide into your life through a screen. It can find you even when your doors are locked and the lights are on. That’s not paranoia—that’s the digital reality we’re living in. 

Here’s the truth: cyberstalking isn’t just annoying messages or somebody lurking in your comments. It’s a pattern of control, intimidation, and obsession carried out through technology. And yes—deepfake porn absolutely counts. When someone takes your image, your smile, your face, and stitches it onto someone else’s body without your permission, that’s not a prank—that’s sexual violation. That’s abuse. And it is happening to women, especially Black women, at alarming rates.

Let’s call it what it is:

It’s digital sexual violence.
It’s psychological warfare.
It’s a modern form of stalking.

And it hits Black women hard because we already live in a society that treats our names, our images, and our bodies like public property. Folks have been trying to control our reputations since before the plantation. Technology just gave them new tools.

But here is what they never count on:

We learn. We adapt. We protect. We speak. We organize. We educate. We change laws. 

We don’t shrink.
We don’t suffer in silence.
We tell the truth.

If this is happening to you, hear me—what they are doing is not your fault. 

We are in a new era where the battlefield isn’t always physical. Sometimes the attack is a rumor, a screenshot, an digitally-generated lie that looks like your face.

But we still have power.

We can:

• Document everything
• Report accounts and keep records
• Seek legal help—laws are catching up
• Build spaces with strong boundaries where we are protected and believed
• Teach our children that consent applies in every dimension—body, mind, and pixels

Your existence is not up for distortion.

Your face is not a toy.

Your identity is not a prop.

And no technology—old or new—will ever be enough to silence a woman who knows her worth.