Bullies at Work: Digital Harassment is Becoming a Workplace Risk Across the UK and Europe

By Richard Knowlton

Chair, Richard Knowlton Associates

Each February, Safer Internet Day invites governments, companies, educators, and civil society to reflect on how digital technologies can be used more safely and responsibly. It is a genuinely global moment, observed on the same day across continents, designed to prompt collective attention rather than isolated initiatives.

Yet the conversation it generates is still surprisingly narrow. Public debate focuses overwhelmingly on children, schools, and consumer social media platforms.

That focus is understandable, but it is no longer enough. One of the most significant and under-examined digital risks in the UK and across Europe now sits firmly inside organisations themselves: bullying and cyberbullying in the workplace.

As work has become more digital, more remote, and more dependent on platforms and algorithms, harassment has not disappeared. It has evolved. In many cases, it has become subtler, easier to deny, and more deeply embedded in everyday organisational processes.

Workplace cyberbullying is no longer a marginal HR issue or an unfortunate clash of personalities. It is a structural risk of modern work, with implications for wellbeing, governance, compliance, and organisational resilience.

Rethinking bullying for a digital workplace

When people think of workplace bullying, they often picture physical presence: the raised voice, the intimidating manager, the hostile meeting. Cyberbullying disrupts that image. It happens through email, messaging apps, shared documents, video calls, performance dashboards, and increasingly through automated or AI-supported management systems.

What defines cyberbullying is not the technology itself, but the persistent misuse of digital channels to undermine, exclude, humiliate, or control. Unlike face-to-face bullying, digital harassment often leaves just enough trace to hurt, while allowing plausible deniability. A sharp message becomes “efficiency”. Public criticism is reframed as “transparency”. Exclusion from a meeting is dismissed as an oversight.

Hybrid and remote working have intensified these dynamics. When interaction is mediated by tools rather than shared space, power is exercised asynchronously and often invisibly. For the person on the receiving end, the experience feels continuous. For the person exerting pressure, it may feel fragmented or even incidental. That imbalance helps explain why digital bullying can be so corrosive.

How cyberbullying shows up at work

In practice, workplace cyberbullying is rarely overt abuse. More often it appears as patterns of behaviour that seem minor in isolation but damaging in combination.

Common examples include repeated public criticism in group chats or email threads; being quietly excluded from digital meetings or shared documents; or being met with silence when input is offered. Performance management tools can be weaponised through selective metrics or constant micro-monitoring. Collaboration platforms can drift into surveillance tools rather than enablers of teamwork.

There is also a growing form of procedural bullying. Formal processes such as complaints, audits, performance improvement plans, or even “wellbeing checks” are used aggressively rather than constructively. Because these actions are digitally recorded, they carry an appearance of objectivity even when intent is questionable.

Cyberbullying is not always top-down. In flatter organisations and digitally native teams, harassment can occur laterally or upwards. Anonymous reporting tools, internal social platforms, and informal messaging channels can facilitate coordinated pressure on managers, particularly when decisions are unpopular or politically sensitive.

Is the problem getting worse?

Measuring workplace cyberbullying is difficult. Under-reporting remains widespread, especially where organisational cultures discourage complaints or reward stoicism. Even so, evidence from across the UK and Europe points in a clear direction: cyber-enabled harassment is becoming more common and more visible, even where traditional bullying rates appear stable.

Several forces are driving this. Remote and hybrid working have normalised constant connectivity, blurring boundaries between work and personal life. Economic uncertainty and job insecurity increase stress and competition, which in turn amplify aggressive behaviour. At the same time, organisations have adopted digital tools at speed, often without thinking through their psychosocial consequences.

There is also a lag in thinking. Many organisations still treat bullying as a behavioural issue, disconnected from technology. Policies exist, but they are often written for an analogue workplace and fail to reflect how power and pressure now operate digitally.

Harmful behaviour flourishes in those gaps.

Who is most affected?

Workplace cyberbullying does not affect everyone equally.

Younger employees are particularly vulnerable because they rely heavily on digital feedback for progression and lack informal power. Women and minorities are more likely to experience harassment framed as “tone”, “fit”, or “communication style”. Neurodivergent staff may be disproportionately affected by ambiguous digital cues and public criticism.

Remote workers and freelancers face additional risks. Physical absence reduces informal support and visibility, while digital metrics become the primary measure of performance. In platform-mediated work, algorithmic management can intensify these pressures, creating a sense of constant evaluation without meaningful voice.

Managers are not immune. In some sectors, especially those that are public-facing or highly regulated, leaders themselves become targets of sustained digital pressure, sometimes spilling over from external platforms into internal systems.

Law, regulation, and employer responsibility

One reason workplace cyberbullying is so difficult to tackle is the lack of a single, clear legal framework. In the UK, there is no standalone offence of workplace bullying.

Protection comes indirectly through health and safety duties, equality law, employment law, and case law on harassment or constructive dismissal. Employers have a duty to protect staff from psychosocial harm, but enforcement is often reactive.

Across Europe, the picture is fragmented but moving in a consistent direction. Many EU countries explicitly recognise psychosocial risks at work, and there is growing emphasis on employer responsibility for mental health and digital dignity. At EU level, bodies such as the European Commission increasingly frame digital wellbeing as a governance issue rather than a purely social one.

What matters here is the shift in tone. Regulators are moving away from a narrow focus on individual misconduct and towards systems, incentives, and organisational design. The key question becomes not just whether a bully exists, but whether the workplace environment makes harmful behaviour more likely.

Social media companies often dominate public discussions of cyberbullying, but in the workplace their role is secondary. Responsibility rests primarily with employers and with providers of workplace technologies. Workplace cyberbullying is not a content-moderation problem; it is an organisational accountability problem.

From internal problem to strategic vulnerability

Most workplace cyberbullying arises from poor organisational design, weak leadership capability, or badly governed digital tools. But stopping the analysis there misses a more uncomfortable reality.

The same techniques seen in everyday workplace cyberbullying are increasingly visible in deliberate intimidation campaigns linked to hybrid conflict.

Modern hybrid warfare blends cyber operations, information manipulation, legal pressure, and psychological techniques. Institutions such as NATO have consistently emphasised that the goal is rarely dramatic disruption. It is erosion: of trust, morale, cohesion, and confidence over time.

Persistent online harassment fits this logic well. Across the UK and Europe there is credible evidence of coordinated digital harassment targeting journalists, academics, judges, healthcare professionals, election officials, regulators, and specialists working in defence, energy, and other critical sectors. These campaigns involve waves of abuse, reputational smears, threats, and coordinated complaints. Individually, messages may seem trivial. Together, they are exhausting and destabilising.

Attribution is usually indirect. Activity is channelled through proxy accounts or loosely affiliated networks, providing plausible deniability. Open-source investigations have linked such campaigns, depending on context, to actors aligned with Russia, China, and Iran. What is striking is not the narrative, but the consistency of method.

Targets are often chosen because of their professional role, not their beliefs. A regulator enforcing sanctions or an engineer working on sensitive infrastructure may be attacked simply because their role matters. The aim is friction: to make certain jobs psychologically costly to do.

These campaigns often exploit workplace processes. Harassment is timed around inspections, publications, or policy decisions. Allegations are framed to trigger internal investigations or compliance reviews, effectively weaponising HR and governance mechanisms. The line between external harassment and internal workplace stress becomes blurred.

Artificial intelligence amplifies this convergence. Automated account creation, translation, and content variation make sustained pressure easier and cheaper. As with AI inside organisations, the technology does not remove responsibility; it shifts it.

Two cautions are important. Most workplace cyberbullying is not state-driven, and over-attribution is a real risk. The strongest evidence relates to security-sensitive sectors. Even so, the overlap in techniques reinforces a key point: workplace cyberbullying sits on the same continuum as information operations and psychological pressure.

Does gender matter?

Yes, and in important ways.

Across sectors, women are more likely to be targeted overall, and the harassment they experience is more often personal, sexualised, or threatening. Female journalists, academics, and public-facing professionals receive disproportionate abuse focused on appearance, sexuality, or family roles. Threats of sexual violence are far more commonly directed at women, with a clear chilling effect on participation and visibility.

Men are more often targeted through status- or competence-based attacks.

Harassment focuses on authority, credibility, or perceived weakness, often framed as ridicule rather than threat. In male-dominated sectors, this can still be highly effective.

In hybrid or state-linked campaigns, gender is often used instrumentally. Women are targeted because gendered abuse escalates impact quickly. Men in senior or technical roles may be targeted to undermine authority and confidence. In both cases, the goal is behavioural: silence, withdrawal, or excessive caution.

Inside organisations, these dynamics compound existing inequalities. Digital harassment creates persistent, searchable records of criticism or allegation. For employers, this makes cyberbullying not just a wellbeing issue, but a governance, retention, and diversity risk.

AI inside the organisation

AI is reshaping workplace dynamics from the inside as well as the outside.

Used carefully, AI tools can help identify harmful patterns through sentiment analysis or anomaly detection, supporting early intervention. Used poorly, they amplify risk. Automated performance scoring, productivity tracking, and behavioural analytics increase surveillance and reduce autonomy. Opaque systems leave people feeling judged by mechanisms they cannot understand or challenge.

The lesson is consistent. AI does not absolve organisations of responsibility. It increases it. Decisions about transparency, oversight, and use are strategic choices with cultural consequences.

Why Safer Internet Day matters at work

Seen alone, workplace cyberbullying already causes real harm. Seen in context, it becomes something more serious: a vulnerability that can be exploited internally and externally. The same digital environments that enable modern work can, if poorly governed, become channels for sustained psychological pressure.

Safer Internet Day offers a chance to broaden the conversation. Not away from children and education, but towards a fuller understanding of digital safety across working life. For organisations in the UK and Europe, that means recognising workplace cyberbullying for what it is: a structural risk of digital work, intersecting with wellbeing, compliance, resilience, and in some sectors, national security.

Addressing it requires more than awareness. It requires thoughtful organisational design, capable digital leadership, and ethical governance of technology. Without that, the modern workplace risks becoming not just unhealthy, but quietly and persistently unsafe.

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