When Technically Plausible Advice Is Unsafe: A Cross-Ecosystem Measurement of Online Support for Technology-Facilitated Abuse
Technology-facilitated abuse (TFA) creates an adversarial setting where sound cybersecurity advice can be unsafe: changing credentials or resetting devices may alert an abuser, destroy evidence, or increase escalation risk. Victims seek guidance from search engines, peer forums, and conversational AI, often evaluated for relevance and correctness rather than contextual safety. We measure whether these sources meet victims' needs. From a decade of r/Stalking narratives, we construct 2,797 victim-derived queries spanning 11 misuse categories. We analyze 27,162 Google webpages, 2,476 Reddit query--thread responses, and 250 responses from three general-purpose LLMs and two survivor-support chatbots. Our framework measures technical quality and damaging guidance, plus secondary-link integrity on webpages, toxicity on Reddit, and trauma-informed support in conversational systems. We find failures & risks that relevance, accuracy, or actionability alone do not capture. Web Search and conversational systems frequently return relevant information; Reddit responses are less consistently relevant and actionable. In our evaluated accuracy sample, 17.3% of webpages, 13.3% of Reddit threads, and 19.6% of conversational AI responses contained damaging guidance. Further, 65.5% of victim queries led to a webpage with a secondary URL flagged by multiple VirusTotal engines, over 20% received a toxic Reddit comment, and every conversational system produced guidance that overlooked escalation risk. Specialization did not guarantee better support: HopeChat underperformed general-purpose LLMs on several dimensions, while Ruth remained limited in trauma-informed support. These findings expose a gap between technical quality and contextual safety. Safe TFA assistance requires risk-aware recommendations, trustworthy sources, uncertainty communication, and human support, beyond technically plausible answers.