Chubb Limited, insurance company, expands cyberbullying coverage to U.S.

Policy holders who pay a premium toward home invasion and carjacking coverage through one of the country’s largest insurers now have a new option available: protection from cyberbullies.

Chubb Limited announced on Wednesday that it has expanded it’s cyberbullying coverage to customers in Colorado, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, allowing policy holders there to purchase plans that pay upwards of $60,000 toward expenses incurred as a result of Internet-enabled harassment.

“Technology has radically altered our everyday life, from how we consume information, conduct business and interact with one another,” Christie Alderman, Chubb’s vice president of of Client Product & Service, said in a statement. “But technology’s biggest benefit — an interconnected world — can also be its biggest challenge. Cyberbullying, including online threats and harassment, can damage your or your child’s reputation, and cause financial loss and emotional harm. Chubb’s new policy helps victims reclaim their lives.”

The Zurich-based, multibillion dollar insurer began offering cyberbullying coverage to customers in the U.K. last December and said this week that it plans on expanding coverage across the U.S. in the coming months. Speaking to Reuters this week, Chubb said it believes it is the first company to offer a cyberbulling policy.

In the meantime, Chubb said it’s broadening its Masterpiece Family Protection policy in four states to include what some have called “troll insurance” that can be purchased alongside plans that cover expenses related to stalking threats, air rage and child abduction.

Specifically, Chubb’s cyberbully coverage allows policy holders to be compensated for “expenses related to harassment and intimidation committed via personal computers, telephones or mobile devices.”

“Clients may recover costs incurred when cyberbullying results in wrongful termination, false arrest, wrongful discipline in an educational institution or diagnosed debilitating shock, mental anguish or mental injury leading to the inability of the client or a family member to attend school or work for more than a week. The coverage provides compensation for psychiatric services, rest and recuperation expenses, lost salary, temporary relocation services, education expenses, professional public relations services, and cyber security consultants,” Chubb said.

An article published in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics last year concluded that around a quarter of U.S. adolescents have been cyberbullied over social media, and a Pew study in 2014 determined that 40 percent of adult Internet users have been harassed online in one way or another.

But Sameer Hinduja, the co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center at Florida Atlantic University, told NorthJersey.com this week that “the vast majority of cyber bullying cases are very minor.”

While purchasing a cyberbullying policy might not appeal to most customers, Mr. Hinduja said, “It does matter to those who are more wealthy and looking for a safety net.”

“It probably plays to their fears,” he said.

Indeed, Andrew Auernheimer — a self-described “nationalist hacktivist” and notorious Internet troll who took credit last week for a headline-grabbing anti-Semitic stunt that’s been widely panned as offensive — told The Washington Times on Thursday that “Insurance companies are finally cashing in on a cyberbullying myth meant to garner middle-class support for censorship.”

“The margins on this insurance are going to be absolutely insane as it’s limited to being an extension to a plan for families and thus excluding all the histrionic childless feminists and deviants crying about it,” said Mr. Auernheimer, who goes by the alias “weev.”

As The Times reported last week, Mr. Auernheimer said he is responsible for executing a basic computer script that allowed him to spam the computer labs at colleges across the U.S. with fliers advertising a neo-Nazi website.

The act raised security concerns at schools from Boston to Berkley, and an NBC News station in California reported on Wednesday that the incident is being investigated as a hate crime by the FBI.