Harassment of women: How does social media promote the abuse and intimidation of women?

Women are being increasingly abused online, so why don't the police, government and social media platforms make more serious efforts to stop it?

I am the BBC's first disinformation correspondent, and I receive a lot of abusive messages on social media every day, most of them very aggressive, including insults that cannot be mentioned here, and even threats of rape. And why? My coverage of conspiracies and false news and their repercussions.

I expected to be criticized, controversy and challenged about what I wrote, but the misogyny that pervades me has become a regular and recurring thing.

I receive messages full of slander and abuse just for being a woman, some of which include threats to rape and behead me, and to commit violent sexual acts with me. Some of these messages contain a strange mixture of conspiracy theories, such as that I am "under the control of Zionism" or that I am personally responsible for raping children. Of course, there are a lot of obscene insults.

I am not the only one who suffers from this, I have heard about the experiences of many women, in many fields, from politicians to reality stars, to female doctors on the front lines of the fight against Corona, all of whom are subjected to the same kind of hate.

New research, the results of which were seen by the BBC, indicate that women are more likely to receive this type of abuse than men, and that the situation is getting worse, often combined with racism and homophobia.

To understand the reasons for this, the dimensions of the threat it poses, and why not enough efforts are being made to stop it, whether by social media, the police or the government? She decided to shoot a film for the investigative documentary program "Panorama" on BBC 1 TV.

Within the framework of the programme, the British analytical research center “Demos” conducted a comprehensive research on the abuses that participants in reality TV programs are exposed to, and chose “Love Island” and “Marriage at First Sight” as examples because they allow a comparison between the abuses directed at men and women from different backgrounds, By analyzing more than 90,000 posts and comments.

Abusive accounts are not punished

Social media companies say they take misogyny seriously, and have rules in place to protect users from abuse. This includes suspending, restricting, or even closing the offending account.

But from my personal experience, these companies often do nothing of what they say. Facebook reported some of the worst messages I've received, including threats to rape me in my own home, and committing atrocious sexual acts against me.

But months later, the accounts I reported were still on Facebook, along with dozens of other accounts on Twitter and Instagram sending me abusive messages and comments.

And my experience turned out to be part of a stereotype. New research by the Center for Combating Digital Hate shows that 97 percent of the 330 accounts that post misogynistic content on Twitter and Instagram are still active after being reported.

Twitter and Instagram say they take action when their posting rules are violated, and closing the offending account is not the only option.

Personal contact with abusers

My curiosity to know what kind of account holders offend me and other women led me to research their personal information.

Most of them were men residing in the United Kingdom. Real people, not robots, one of them, for example, supports the same soccer team that I support, and another likes vegetarian dishes.

I tried to contact them, and one of them, a truck driver in his sixties, agreed to speak to me on the phone. In fact what he sent me was generally related to my being female, and less hideous than most of what I receive.

Like many abusive account holders, he is a staunch proponent of conspiracy theories.

Almost at the end of the conversation he said, "Maybe I was wrong, I'm generally a fair man."

He indicated that, in turn, he receives hate messages from people who believe in global warming, and that the events of September 11 are real, in response to the ideas of conspiracy theories that he publishes.

I hoped this would lead him to realize that hate is not the answer. And I think he's starting to flip the idea around in his head.

Facebook, Instagram and suggesting offensive content

All the major social media owners say they do not promote hatred and abuse of women on their platforms, and are taking action to stop it.

But all sites have algorithms that show us content based on what we post, what we like, or what we've seen.

To find out if the algorithms used in social media are suggesting more misogynistic content to misogynist accounts. I created a fictitious character for a man named Barry, bearing the characteristics of people who pursue and abuse others, and created accounts for him on five different social networking sites, one of the most popular in Britain.

I used a computer-modified image, and entered data similar to the accounts from which I received abuse, in terms of interests and the quality of the material being shared, and made it anti-Coronavirus vaccine and conspiracy theorist, and interested in anti-women content, in addition to publishing some abuse, but without sending messages. hostile character to anyone.

This was based on the advice of Chloe Coliver, a media expert, who works at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in the field of extremism and disinformation, and has previously assisted a number of journalists.

After just a week, the suggested pages for Barry to follow on Facebook and Instagram were almost all promoting misogyny. Over some time these pages increased greatly, some of which included sexual violence and horrific things, and tolerance of rape, harassment and gender-based violence.

There were also suggestions for pages containing extremist ideas, including the "Ansel" movement, which considers that all men's problems are caused by women, and there was a link between it and several incidents of violence against women in Britain.

"If Barry had been a real person, his inclusion in a misogynistic hostile group would have already taken place, very quickly, in just two weeks," Culliver said.

Instead of preventing him from interacting with anti-women content, it appears that Facebook and Instagram encouraged Barry to do so, unlike TikTok, which did not suggest any such content, while these suggestions were very few on Twitter. YouTube suggested some anti-women videos.

Facebook, which also owns Instagram, says it tries not to suggest content that breaks its rules and is working to improve its technology to "find any abuse and speed up the removal process".

YouTube says it has "strict policies" on hate and that it removes offending content "quickly".

And that wasn't the only aspect that surprised me about the experience. Barry's main interest was conspiracy theories, and I expected him to receive a torrent of this kind of content, but that was not the case at all.

Social media is under increasing pressure to prevent the promotion of misinformation about vaccines and the pandemic. But why didn't that happen with the misogynistic content on Facebook and Instagram?

"They increase their profits by getting people interested in violence, which is content that is often hostile towards women," says Culver.

The number of Facebook users is about 3 billion people around the world, and the company's profits from advertising last year were about $32 per person. The longer people use the site, the more ads will be sold, and the more profits will be made.

This is despite Facebook saying that "protecting" its community is "more important than raising profits" and announced new measures to tackle sexual abuse targeting journalists, politicians and celebrities on its sites.

Reality TV Shows and Targeting Posts

After analyzing the abuse messages directed at participants in reality TV shows such as "Love Island" and "Marriage at First Sight". It turns out that women's share of attacks on social media is much greater than men's, and this often accompanies racism.

On Twitter, 26 percent of the tweets about the reality TV contestants were abusive compared to 14 percent of the abuse of the male contestants.

“The abusers have used gender-based insults explicitly,” says Elaine Goodson, who leads Demos research and focuses on social media policy. “Women are controlling, deceitful, sexist, evil or stupid. Men are attacked for not being so masculine. Enough, or they are weak.

"And we also see that women of color are also subjected to harsher attacks on the basis of race."

"The hardest offense to receive is racist abuse, when they can only see that I am a black woman with dark skin, and my family's abuse breaks my heart," says Kaz Kamui L on Love Island, a 26-year-old fashion blogger.

From virtual to real

To find out the impact of this type of abuse, I spoke to female politicians and doctors who use social media in their jobs, accept criticism but reluctance when it becomes personal.

The former leader of the Scottish Conservative Party, Ruth Davidson, has expressed her fear that targeting women online could turn back the clock on gender equality on the ground.

"I had direct attacks related to my politics, some of the attacks related to my body, many of them related to the fact that I was gay, and a large number also because I was an opinionated woman," Davidson says.

There are fears that abuse in the virtual world will turn into real harm in the real world.

Dr. Rachel Clark, a doctor in Oxford who treats patients infected with the Corna virus, uses social media to spread warnings about the impact of the Corona virus, and encourages her followers to take the vaccine.

She says she receives messages threatening her with violent rape "until you suffocate and need a respirator."

She notes that fellow male doctors "are abused online too. But the volume is much lower. If you're a doctor, the attack will be more intense, and the satire of being a woman gets fiercer."

Offline violence

During research by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on the overall impact of online hate, researcher Julie Bossetti and her team asked more than 800 female journalists about their experiences.

They studied some accounts, including those of Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa. An investigative journalist from the Philippines, who has been subject to a lot of online attacks, she says she wears a flak jacket because she is afraid of being attacked.

"Online violence is a new front in the struggle that women around the world are facing," Bossetti says.

Twenty percent of the female journalists who participated in the survey conducted by UNESCO in cooperation with the International Center for Journalists indicated that they had experienced attacks on the ground, including stalking and physical assault.

When the police came

I have particular concerns about hate messages I receive online, some from a man previously convicted of stalking women. But the police response frustrated me.

At the end of April of this year, I reported to the police that I was receiving serious threats, including sexual violence. Targeting with offensive or obscene messages on the Internet is considered a felony in Britain.

A police officer contacted me, giving her evidence of the abuse, but I didn't hear back from her until weeks later when she called to tell me she had moved to a different team. I transferred my case to another team, and the new officer contacted me only in July when it turned out that my evidence had been lost.

I tried to report another set of rape and death threats to the new officer at the end of July, and when we met face to face about a month later, the officer admitted that he was not the right person to handle the case, and that it should have been transferred to a specialized team.

By the end of August a third officer had taken over the case and asked me to review the file of evidence I had sent, specifying which messages were from Twitter, and which were from Instagram or Facebook, because he wasn't sure how to use these platforms.

As for the last officer to take over the case, he requested more information from social media, but there has been no progress so far.

According to data from a number of police stations, obtained by Panorama, the number of people reporting online hate has doubled over the past five years. However, arrests during the same period increased by only 32 percent. Most of the victims are women.

This comes at a time when police agencies are under increasing pressure to do more to tackle violence against women on Britain's streets.

When I mentioned my concerns that people who abuse me in the virtual world might actually catch me in my workplace, I was told to call 999 if I felt in danger.

In turn, the Metropolitan Police says it takes online hate attacks seriously, and my case is under investigation.

The National Police Presidency Council says the police take reports of any kind of abusive communication seriously and will investigate, but must set priorities due to their limited resources. It is possible to take measures other than arrests.

What are the solutions?

The "Panorama" program was briefed exclusively on the report that includes the draft United Nations proposals to urge companies that own social media platforms to provide better protection for women.

The report calls on platforms to adopt ratings of accounts that have previously been implicated in misogyny and abuse. It also calls for more human oversight in making decisions about offensive material, and an early warning system for users, in case they believe hypothetical abuse could develop into actual abuse in the real world.

"I think we have to keep challenging," says Ruth Davidson. "I don't think it's in anyone's interest for women to remain vulnerable to abuse online, in a way that men don't, and we get to a point where young women think that being abused is the norm," she says.

For women of all ages, myself included, this means refusing to be bullied on social media just for being women.