Online Gendered Hate Speech Targets Women in Civic Spaces: Transnational Report

"Women's safety in the online sphere needs to be guaranteed to support democratic progress and improve gender equality in public life."

This report, published by Internews, explores the results of a study on online gendered hate speech and its impact on women in civic spaces. Using real-life examples from social media in the Global South, the report seeks to answer the questions: What does online gendered harmful content look like globally? And how does online gendered harmful content impact public-facing women?

As explained in the report, "the issue of online gendered harmful content is a significant one, as it can have serious consequences for individuals and communities. Online harassment and abuse can cause severe emotional distress and potentially lead to physical harm. Women and members of marginalized gender identities are particularly vulnerable to this type of abuse, and studies have shown that they are more likely to experience online harassment than men. Online gendered harmful content, especially when targeting public-facing women, has a particularly disastrous impact on free speech and democratic participation, as both the target and other women can be intimidated and silenced. This narrowing of public discourse limits the diversity of voices and perspectives that are represented in online and offline civic spaces and decision-making."

The findings in this report are based on research and social media monitoring conducted by local researchers on Internews' Harmful Speech Watch (formerly UMBER) project. The project aimed to monitor, contextualise, and analyse on-the-ground implications of online harmful speech (i.e., hate speech, misinformation, harassment, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, criminal activities, graphic content, etc.). The content monitored focused predominantly on Facebook, due to the platform accounting for the highest level of social media penetration across the globe. However, the project also encompassed other platforms and attempted to gauge cross-platform migration.

Internews' online harmful speech monitoring uncovered that many of the trends already well documented in the Western world were reflected across all regions covered by the project. The trends identified by researchers broadly fell into three categories: ƒ

1. Gendered hate speech/sexualisation of female politicians - The research showed that female politicians are not only disproportionately targeted but also exposed to different forms of harassment and abuse. Attacks targeting male politicians tend to smear their professionalism, whereas online harassment directed at female politicians focuses more on physical appearance, sexuality, and efforts to bring their moral character into question. Harrassment of female politicians often includes threats of sexual violence and features humiliating or sexualised imagery.
2. Victim blaming of public figures - The research demonstrates how social media content across the globe tends to reproduce misogynistic stereotypes that associate masculinity with violence, domination, independence, aggression, and power, while women are primarily linked to their sexual "value". Many posts that targeted women tended to represent women as victims and as responsible for the violence of which they were victims.
3. Anti-Feminist Rhetoric - Feminist activists and non-governmental organisation (NGO) workers (especially those working on gender-related violence) are notably targeted with online hate speech. This trend was found to be most prominent in Latin America.

In terms of the way forward, the report discusses various strategies, including legal action and platform-level interventions. Pursuing legislation criminalising online gender-based violence is difficult to enforce when dealing with huge volumes of offending content, particularly when many users are anonymous. For this reason, legislation targeting the platforms themselves needs to be developed to "incentivise" companies to take more effective action. Getting social media companies to increase investment in making their platforms safer spaces and to implement more rigorous content moderation measures has, however, proven complex and challenging. For this reason, the report makes the point that activists, civil society, and non-profit organisations play an essential role in keeping the spotlight on the prevalence and impact of online harmful content.

In addition, donors are considered key to facilitating the kind of impact that is required to secure meaningful solutions. Greater funding for projects and research dealing with gendered harmful speech is crucial to understanding the problem to formulate evidence-based, coordinated responses to toxic and violent narratives on a global level, as well as curtailing its sources, spread, and impact.

In turn, Internews argues, civil society organisations and non-profits must bolster their mainstreaming of gender, technology, and democracy into all their programmes, as the negative intersections of these issues have proven to be detrimental to pluralistic political and social participation. Finally, organisations such as Internews should coordinate with others to map the use of social media and other digital technologies to facilitate inclusive participation - and/or the weaponisation of these technologies to perpetrate attacks on human rights.