Before Teela Reid was serving it to Malcolm Turnbull on Q&A, she was a young lawyer learning the ropes of her craft.

The proud Wiradjuri and Wailwan woman would take to Twitter to voice her opinions.

"I didn't really have a filter; I just tweeted whatever I wanted," Teela told Hack.

But that soon ended after Teela started copping abuse online.

I had one incident of someone being quite demeaning to me about something I'd tweeted. I decided to deactivate and get off the site.

"It was overwhelming," Teela said.

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According to new research released on Monday by think tank The Australia Institute, Teela's experience is more common than we think.

Nearly two out of five - or 39 per cent - of the 1,557 respondents said they'd been the victim of online abuse or trolling.

The study was commissioned by author Ginger Gorman, who through the course of researching her book Troll Hunting discovered that no modelling had been done on the social and economic impacts of online abuse.

The scope of what "online abuse" entails is pretty huge, researcher Tom Swann told Hack.

"This ranged from everything from the threats of sexual assault or rape, death threats, threats to be stalked in real life, or sexual photos of yourself being posted to sex sites or porn sites," he said.

It also encompasses things like abusive language and outright racism. People of colour, like Teela, are particularly vulnerable to race-based online abuse.

While the proportion of men and women who were targeted was roughly the same, the forms of abuse directed at each of them was different.

"Women were more likely to experience some of the more extreme forms of abuse and harassment, in particular what we call cyberhate, which is repeated attacks or sustained attacks on an individual. Nine per cent of women said they'd experienced this compared to six per cent of men," Tom said.

To put this in context, it's the equivalent of one in 13 people overall, or 1.3 million Australians.

How old you are can also determine how likely you are to receive abuse.

"Younger people were more likely to be the target of this kind of behaviour, much more so than older people, and that's in part because they use the internet more. But having said that, even people who use the internet for less than one hour a day, more than a quarter said they'd experienced online abuse or harassment," Tom said.

The impact of abuse

People who've been trolled, like Teela, might be forced to stop using social media altogether.

"It was absolutely for my mental health," Teela said of her decision to disengage from Twitter for a while.

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The Australia Institute survey asked people if being the victim of online abuse affected wellbeing. Tom found out that a lot of people were feeling the strain of being victimised.

One in eight people said online abuse had negatively impacted their wellbeing. That's equivalent to over two million Australians.

Four per cent of survey respondents said trolling led them to seek help from a doctor or psychologist, with the same number of respondents saying trolling has led to them working less or earning less.

The research used that to extrapolate estimates of what this would cost the economy, and found that it had a huge impact - a loss of productivity of up to $3.7 billion.

Changing behaviour

The modelling by The Australia Institute didn't examine how online abuse can be used as a way of silencing people by forcing them offline. Nor did it examine if people were using the internet less as a result of trolling.

Teela's pretty lucky because her job as a lawyer means she doesn't have to be on social media to stay employed, and she gains strength from the sense of community with other Indigenous Australians that being online brings.

But copping hate online has made her rethink how she uses social media.

I am in some ways filtering what I say and when I say it.

"It means I'm choosing what I spend time and energy on, and I will pick and choose what I respond to," Teela said.

"I've found that by taking the approach that I do now, that it's become a space that I can control. At the end of the day I've realised that I have to protect myself."