Flynn Adams and Jane Seymour.Photo: couresy Flynn Adams
Flynn Adams was a victim of online harassment — and now she’s fighting back.
The daughter of actressJane Seymourand former CMO of BitTorrent createdTRIPP(Threat Resolution and Incident Preservation Platform) to fill a critical role in digital safety.
Adams' goal for this platform is to allow the user to gain back control. This way, “there is no excuse for someone to say, ‘Sorry, we can’t help you,'” Adams, 41, tells PEOPLE.
“A human being’s sense of safety should not be up to an algorithm. It shouldn’t be up to the social media platforms or even law enforcement for that matter,” she says. “It should be up to the human being who is experiencing that behavior.”
Adams’ drive for this project stems from her personal experiences with online harassment and abuse. As a high-ranking female executive, the role brought a level of visibility and public scrutiny she had never experienced before.
According to Adams, there was even an instance where a husband and a wife created fake accounts to impersonate her, her husband and her business — and the couple went as far as posting her home address, where “extremely dangerous people” showed up at her front door to “cash in on, I guess you’d call it, advertised services.”
That’s when it hit her.
“When someone willfully puts you or your family, your friends, in my case, obviously a 3-year-old at the time, in danger simply because they thought it was funny or attention-grabbing or served some other purpose … What do you do?” says Adams. “And the reality is most importantly, why aren’t there enforceable consequences for that kind of behavior?”
TRIPP, Adams says, is not the end-all, be-all solution. However, it is a toolset that will grant the user the ability to identify when something bad is happening and to preserve it in the right way.
According to Adams, the manner in which you capture an incident ultimately determines what kind of action you can take. The problem with screenshots on the other hand, she says, is that they can be altered — and therefore are not considered an authenticated piece of evidence in a court of law.
The most sobering part, according to Adams, is that despite her “good fortune” and access to heads of security and legal, high-ranking members of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and even access to high-ranking members of law enforcement — none of it mattered.
“Not even when you can call somebody and say, ‘This bad thing is happening to me and it’s really dangerous and it’s a crime, please make it stop’ … At the end of the day no one cares about your personal safety [more than you],” says Adams.
Brian Austin Green, 48, one of the founding partners of Inteliqore, is “a force to be reckoned with, with respect to his advocacy for child safety,” says Adams.
Flynn’s famous mother, Jane Seymour, is an adviser in the company as well.
Inteliqore also visits schools to teach children about their activities online — as a reminder that there are actual human beings on the other side of the screen.
“It’s important to remind people that if you can’t have a civil conversation with someone online without harassing them, then you should be willing to accept the consequences that come with that behavior,” she says.
“And with respect to freedom of speech … I always say that being an asshole is not a protected civil liberty,” says Adams. “It’s a choice.”
source: people.com
