There is a form of online behaviour affecting animal welfare organisations that we need to start talking about. Sometimes it begins with a genuine concern, sometimes with a disagreement or an accusation, and sometimes there appears to be no meaningful concern about the organisation’s work at all. The organisation, or somebody within it, simply becomes the focus of a person’s attention, and that attention persists.
Posts are watched, photographs are examined, videos are replayed and old material is retrieved. People connected with the organisation may be researched and activity followed across different platforms. New information can then be interpreted through an existing belief about the organisation or the individual behind it. For some organisations this lasts weeks; for others it can continue for months or even years. At that point, describing everything as scrutiny risks obscuring what the people on the receiving end are actually experiencing. Sometimes an organisation isn’t being held accountable. It is being targeted.
When everything becomes evidence
One of the most troubling aspects of this behaviour is what happens once somebody has already decided there is something wrong with an organisation. Completely ordinary information can begin to acquire a different meaning. A dog doesn’t appear in a video and its absence becomes suspicious. A dog pants and its breathing becomes evidence of poor welfare. One water bowl appears within the camera frame and the conclusion becomes that there is a welfare problem. Somebody discovers that a person working for an organisation is paid and remuneration itself becomes evidence of fraud. An organisation declines to provide an internal document demanded by a stranger and the refusal becomes evidence that something is being hidden.
This can place an organisation in an impossible circle. If it responds, it is accused of being defensive. If it doesn’t respond, its silence can be interpreted as suspicious. An explanation can be dismissed as an excuse, while refusing to provide information can be portrayed as concealment. If somebody is blocked after persistent unwanted engagement, even the decision to establish that boundary can be presented as evidence that criticism is being silenced. Every possible response can be incorporated into the original belief that something is wrong.
Genuine scrutiny has to contain the possibility that the person doing the scrutinising is mistaken. Without that possibility, the objective is no longer to establish what is true. It becomes an exercise in finding material that supports what has already been decided.
Investigating a concern is not the same as searching indefinitely for one
There is an important difference between investigating a specific concern and continuously investigating an organisation or individual in the hope of finding something that justifies an existing suspicion. Social media makes the latter extraordinarily easy. Years of posts can be searched, videos can be examined second by second, old comments can be retrieved and people connected with an organisation can be located through their own public accounts. Statements made years apart can be placed alongside one another, sometimes without the context in which either was originally made, while activity can be followed simultaneously across multiple platforms.
Looking at publicly available information is not inherently improper. What matters is the pattern, persistence, escalation and behaviour surrounding it. Eventually, the subject may cease to be a particular animal, fundraising appeal, decision or incident. The organisation itself becomes the subject. In some cases, the focus moves even further and settles upon a particular person within it.
That distinction is important because not every person persistently pursuing an organisation is necessarily concerned about its work. Sometimes the attention appears to become focused on an individual: what they say, where they appear, who they speak to, what they post elsewhere and what they do beyond the organisation. The original subject, if there ever was one, can disappear almost completely.
I know people within animal welfare organisations who describe dealing with individuals they regard as stalkers, and I have experienced persistent unwanted pursuit myself. Those are serious words and they should never be casually applied to somebody simply because they are critical, difficult or irritating. But being careful with terminology cannot require us to pretend that persistent unwanted targeted behaviour doesn’t happen. It does, and the fact that much of it happens through a screen does not make its impact on the person receiving it unreal.
Public accountability does not mean permanent personal access
Animal welfare organisations have public facing roles, but the human beings behind them do not consequently become public property. Directors, employees, volunteers, veterinary professionals, contractors, community carers and others can all find themselves drawn into scrutiny because of their connection with an organisation.
There will obviously be circumstances in which somebody’s conduct or interests are relevant to legitimate scrutiny of their organisational role. But that does not make every aspect of their life relevant. There is a point at which examining an organisation’s work can migrate into examining the people associated with it: where else they work, who they know, what they post on personal accounts, which people they follow, what they said years ago and who else is connected to them.
There is an important distinction between scrutinising somebody’s conduct where it is relevant to their organisational responsibilities and pursuing the person themselves. Working for an animal welfare organisation does not require somebody to surrender every personal boundary.
That also means an organisation must be able to end an interaction. Blocking somebody from an organisation’s social media account does not determine whether that person’s original concern was right or wrong; it simply means that access to that particular space has ended. Genuine complaints can still be raised through the organisation’s complaints process, and appropriate external bodies remain available where relevant. Being blocked from Instagram, Facebook or X is not the same thing as being denied access to accountability, and an organisation should not be required to continue an unwanted conversation indefinitely simply because the other person wants it to continue.
A question mark does not erase a pattern of behaviour
Questions themselves are not the problem. Context is what matters. There is a considerable difference between asking whether a water bowl visible in a video is the only one and announcing that the dogs have only one water bowl. There is a difference between a supporter asking how a patient is doing and somebody systematically examining subsequent videos to determine whether that animal appears because they are looking for evidence that something has happened to it.
There is also a difference between asking something once and repeatedly pursuing the same subject across different posts, platforms and people. A question can be used genuinely to seek information, but it can also be framed in a way that communicates an allegation without quite stating one. We therefore cannot understand persistent behaviour by isolating every individual comment from everything that came before it. Frequency, context, persistence and escalation matter. A question mark does not make the surrounding pattern disappear.
Social media gives accusations an audience
A formal complaint has a destination. Social media has an audience, and that fundamentally changes the dynamics.
One person can publish an allegation, another can repeat it and somebody else can search through old material looking for something they believe supports it. Screenshots begin circulating, threads develop and people who have never had any direct contact with the organisation can begin repeating claims made by people who have. The organisation’s response can become new content, but so can its refusal to respond. Blocking somebody can become another post, while every subsequent photograph or video provides fresh material to examine. Eventually, the dispute itself can become content.
We cannot simply assume why an individual behaves in this way. Their motivation may be concern, anger, personal grievance or something else entirely. What we can examine is the environment in which the behaviour takes place. Social media platforms reward attention, conflict attracts it, outrage produces engagement and serious accusations can travel extremely quickly. Careful explanations and subsequent corrections frequently travel much less far. That creates an uncomfortable but necessary question: what happens when scrutinising an organisation becomes engaging content in its own right?
The situation can escalate further when other people join in. One suspicion is repeated, another interpretation is added, somebody finds an old photograph and another person contacts someone associated with the organisation. Before long, people can begin investigating and reinforcing one another’s suspicions. Volume then starts to resemble corroboration when it may be nothing of the sort. Twenty people discussing the same allegation do not constitute twenty independent sources if every claim ultimately derives from the same original assertion. Repetition does not turn an unsupported allegation into evidence.
Accountability is not unlimited disclosure
Another increasingly familiar feature of this behaviour is the demand for proof. Organisations can find themselves being told to produce the receipt for food, identify where it was purchased, disclose how much it cost, state exactly how much was raised to pay for it and then provide photographs or videos showing the animals eating it. Similar demands can be made for veterinary invoices, records, details about particular animals and other internal information.
A demand like that takes seconds to type. Responding to it may involve locating information, checking records, establishing whether something can appropriately be disclosed, consulting another person and preparing a response. Then another demand can follow. If the organisation declines to provide something, the refusal itself may be interpreted as suspicious: what are they hiding?
This creates a circular test in which a stranger decides what an organisation must disclose and then treats failure to satisfy that self created standard as evidence against it. That is not how organisational accountability works. Organisations maintain records and operate within the governance, financial, reporting, compliance and disclosure requirements applicable to their activities, structure and jurisdiction. Some information will be publicly available, some may be available to bodies with appropriate authority and some will quite properly remain confidential. Organisations may voluntarily publish considerably more, but somebody asking for an internal document on social media does not automatically create an obligation to provide it. A social media account is not a public inspection office.
Behind the logo is a human being
This is where the issue stops being theoretical for me. I cannot keep social media volunteers. I have lost several people from the role because they cannot tolerate the attacks directed at them while trying to do the job. These are people who care deeply about animals, but caring about animals doesn’t make somebody impervious to hostility. Eventually some reach the point where they simply don’t want to expose themselves to it anymore.
It is easy for somebody outside an organisation to say that the solution is to give the job to somebody else. The difficulty is finding that somebody else. Animal welfare does not have an endless queue of people waiting to occupy a seat vacated by somebody who could no longer tolerate what was being thrown at them. Volunteers are not disposable, employees are not disposable and the people running organisations are not disposable. You cannot continually burn through human beings and assume another will always appear.
The person operating an organisation’s social media account may have had absolutely nothing to do with whatever is being challenged. They may not have admitted the animal, treated it, made the decision or had any involvement in financial management. Their role may simply be communications, yet they become the human surface against which every suspicion, frustration and accusation is thrown.
A logo doesn’t read an allegation. A person does. A person reads the comment accusing the organisation of fraud. A person opens the hostile message. A person watches strangers discussing their colleagues. A person decides whether to answer and deals with whatever happens next. And that person leaves the screen carrying the experience with them. Sometimes they decide not to come back.
Eventually you anticipate the accusation before it exists
One of the consequences I find most disturbing is that repeated exposure to this behaviour begins to change the way organisations communicate.
Not long ago, one of our long stay patients reached a wonderful stage in what had been a very long wound healing journey. She went for an early morning run with our vet and, when she returned, her nurse filmed her. She was happy, active and enjoying something that would have been impossible earlier in her recovery. She was also panting, because she had just been running.
I didn’t publish the video.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with that dog. Nobody had complained about the video because nobody had even seen it. But I knew somebody could watch those few seconds without knowing what happened before the camera was switched on and decide they were looking at distress. I simply didn’t want the argument.
The anticipated behaviour of strangers was already influencing what we felt able to show them.
Once an organisation has experienced enough of this, it begins looking at completely innocent content through somebody else’s eyes. Can enough water be seen? Is enough shade visible? Will somebody misunderstand why that dog is panting? Will someone notice that another dog isn’t in shot and demand to know where it is? Is there something in the background that can be turned into another argument? Eventually the question changes from would our supporters enjoy seeing this? to how could somebody use this against us?
That is an extraordinary position for an animal welfare organisation to find itself in. Dogs don’t live on film sets. They move bedding, knock things over, get muddy, pant, lie in strange places and behave like dogs. Animal welfare should be about providing what animals need, not arranging visible evidence of good welfare within the dimensions of a smartphone screen.
The pursuit of transparency can produce less of it
There is a terrible irony here. The more ordinary content is dissected and used to construct allegations, the more cautious organisations inevitably become about showing ordinary content. Livestreaming starts to feel risky. Spontaneous videos disappear. Volunteers may no longer be allowed to publish independently. Backgrounds are checked and content is reviewed before publication. Eventually the audience receives a cleaner, safer and increasingly sanitised version of animal welfare.
The ordinary reality disappears. I refuse to do that. Orgs charitable in nature must be transparent & staging & curating is anything but that. But I have found myself reluctant to share perfectly enjoyable videos like the one of Ayse Michelle just in case that one person starts a pile on.
People pursuing organisations in the name of transparency can therefore contribute to an environment in which organisations become increasingly reluctant to provide spontaneous access to their work, not because something sinister is being concealed, but because showing ordinary reality has itself become a risk.
Permanent suspicion has no endpoint
Accountability has processes and the possibility of an outcome. A concern can be raised, information can be considered and, where appropriate, evidence can be examined by people or bodies equipped to assess it. Something may be found to be wrong and need correcting, or the concern may prove unfounded.
Permanent suspicion works differently because it has no natural endpoint. Every answer can produce another question, every photograph another theory, every animal another subject and every refusal to disclose something another allegation of concealment. There may be no amount of information capable of satisfying somebody whose starting position is that the organisation cannot be trusted, because the standard simply moves each time the previous demand is met.
Accountability requires an organisation to answer for its work. Permanent suspicion requires it to continually prove its innocence. Those are not the same thing.
And sometimes even that description doesn’t go far enough, because the behaviour has ceased to be meaningfully about organisational accountability at all. The organisation can become merely the route through which somebody maintains their attention on a particular individual. Their activity elsewhere is followed, unrelated information is collected and other people become relevant simply because they are connected to them.
We should not diagnose strangers or casually label critics as stalkers or harassers. But neither should we insist that every persistent pattern of unwanted online attention deserves to be dignified with the language of accountability simply because its target happens to work for an animal welfare organisation. Sometimes an organisation is not being investigated. Somebody has become fixated upon it, or upon a person within it.
Animal welfare cannot afford to keep losing people
This is ultimately why the issue matters.
Animal welfare work already exposes people to suffering, abandonment, cruelty, illness, death, difficult decisions, financial pressure and the knowledge that however much they achieve, there will always be another animal they cannot reach. We are increasingly asking some of those same people to absorb relentless public suspicion, accusations and persistent unwanted attention as though that is simply another part of the job.
It shouldn’t be.
When volunteers leave, organisations lose capacity. When experienced people burn out, organisations lose knowledge. When communications become impossible, engagement and fundraising can suffer. When organisations become frightened to show ordinary reality, public understanding suffers. When hours are consumed dealing with accusations and demands, those hours are taken from somewhere else. When legal advice becomes necessary, organisational resources have to pay for it.
There is a necessary place for scrutiny, investigation, criticism, complaints and whistleblowing in animal welfare. There must also be a legitimate place for boundaries. Being accountable does not require somebody to accept endless interrogation. Being transparent does not require unrestricted disclosure. Being publicly visible does not grant permanent access to the people behind an organisation, and working in animal welfare should never require somebody to surrender their right to say that an unwanted interaction is over.
Because when persistent pursuit drives good people away, the consequences do not end with the person who leaves. The organisation loses their knowledge, time, experience and capacity to help animals.
And when enough good people are driven out, targeting animal welfare organisations stops being an online behaviour problem. It becomes an animal welfare problem.