A new report released by the United Nations’ gender equality agency, known as U.N. Women, found that 41 percent of women in the public sphere, including activists and journalists, reported being the victims of offline attacks, abuse or harassment that they said was linked with previous online harassment and abuse. The report also found that 76 percent of women human rights activists and 75 percent of female journalists and media workers had experienced “online violence” in the course of their work. The report defines online violence as including “online harassment, abuse, targeted surveillance, image- and video-based abuse, doxxing, gendered hate speech, gendered disinformation, and/or threats.”
In a 2023 briefing for WPR, Hannah Thompson looked at the growth of online misogyny and recommended that social media companies be required to improve the processes they make available to users to report abuse. In the long run, however, Thompson pointed to education as the most effective solution and said tech companies should contribute resources to these efforts. “Involving tech companies and governments in the push for better education on misogyny would be an effective, efficient and adequately funded way to make lesson plans for schoolchildren of all ages and digital citizenship courses widely available,” she wrote.
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