Women journalists receive abuse "within seconds" from posting online

Online abuse is spilling over into abuse in the real world, but a new 'early warning system' aims to halt this concerning trajectory.

Twenty per cent of women journalists internationally experience offline harm connected to online threats, abuse and harassment, according to research by UNESCO and the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). A key recommendation was to monitor online abuse and introduce preventative measures.

Today (20 April 2023) at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, ICFJ did exactly that by unveiling new indicators of abuse, plus a new tool it has developed with the University of Sheffield in the UK.

ICFJ global director Julie Posetti revealed five of 14 "online violence escalation indicators", with the full findings to be published next month by the OSCE, that show the nature of abuse that can trigger offline abuse.

A suspected foreign state actor

Abuse is often linked to journalists 'working for the enemy'. Many BBC Persian journalists who live in the UK but originate from Iran, for example, have been targeted by suspected Iranian state actors.

Threats associated with impunity cases

'You will be next' is the type of messaging that many journalists encounter in connection with targeted attacks.

Northern Irish crime reporter Patricia Devlin, a key interviewee in ICFJ's research, pointed to two compatriots who have been murdered in peace times, Lyra McKee (in 2019) and Martin O’Hagan (in 2001).

"What links those two journalists' murders, even all those years apart, is impunity. Nobody has ever been convicted for those killings," she says on the panel, although two men currently stand trial for McKee's murder.

Devlin went to the police about graffiti death threats linked to her reporting on six occasions, only to be told to change residence or improve security arrangements.

Threats against identified family members

Abusers often threaten journalists' relatives in sickening ways. Devlin has received personal threats directly to her Facebook Messenger account to rape her newborn baby.

ICFJ research shows that 13 per cent of women encounter this type of abuse, and the most frequently cited impact of this is psychological.

Washington Post columnist Rana Ayyub is another women journalist who faces waves of abuse and threats, not just to herself, but to her women relatives as well.

Evidence of targeted surveillance and/or interception

Pegasus spyware is being used to hack and share personal pictures of women journalists on social media, in an attempt to intimidate and silence them.

In the case of Lebanese journalist Ghada Oueiss, these hacked images were manipulated as part of a disinformation campaign.

Intersectional abuse

Sexist abuse often accompanies other forms of discrimination like racism, sectarianism, religious bigotry or homophobia.

India-born Ayyub is a perfect example, as a Muslim woman trolled by self-identified Hindu nationalists.

'A slice of life'

Devlin describes feeling lost in the masses of abuse she has received and not knowing where to turn for help.

To clear up the picture, ICFJ and the University of Sheffield have created The Twitter Abuse Dashboard, with funding from the UK Government Foreign Office. It uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyse tweets in real-time and detect abuse of a particular person.

It has profiled around a dozen reporters including Ayyub. It shows that she can receive abuse within seconds of posting a tweet and the biggest spike of abuse occurs within three minutes. Ayyub even tested what would happen if she just posted a full stop - the abuse still came.

The dashboard is admittedly not perfect, as subtle abuse is particularly hard to detect. But it can identify and break down types of abuse, calculate all sorts of statistics (frequent hashtags, sender), and separate original and retweeted abuse to see how it proliferates. It is interactive, displaying word clouds and top-ranking phrases or topics.

One of Ayyub's most engaged tweets saw 12,000 replies, 460 of which were deemed abusive (3.6 per cent), and it took 12 minutes to get an abusive response.

An analysis of abusive responses to Rana Ayyub's tweets

The data shows a "slice of life" according to Ayyub: "This is co-ordinated and organised, this is not coming in isolation.

"This is why it is extremely important to understand the [connection] between offline and online harassment. There is a very thin line that differentiates [the two]."

She received burnt copies of her own book through the post, a veiled threat that her abusers know where she lives. She says it is essential to start being able to connect the dots.

The tool requires compliance with the platform, in this case, Twitter, and ICFJ intends to branch out to other platforms where journalists are.

Its funding lasts until the end of 2025. Non-profit organisation Luminate has added funding to start bringing in newsroom partners from the Global South. The tool will partner with selected newsrooms in the future, with the long-term goal of being freely and publicly available.

"If Twitter collapses, the trolls, the haters, the networked disinformation agents will find them wherever they go. They’re not disappearing anytime soon, sadly," says Posetti.

"We are doing this out of an act of desperation and exasperation because the platforms have dismally failed to take this problem and threat seriously, and to provide appropriate opportunities to monitor and escalate within their system the targetted online violence that women experience.

"Ultimately, we would hope and expect that platforms would come on board with something like this, to facilitate it themselves and to work with us. But we are not in that situation currently. The door remains open for serious collaboration."

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