A study from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate released this month shares a snapshot of the abuse that women public officials face online—and how social media platforms fail to address or prevent this kind of abuse.
Researchers from the CCDH selected Instagram content from five Republican and five Democrat female incumbents who are running for office running in 2024; including Vice President Kamala Harris, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jasmine Crockett, Nancy Pelosi and Senator Elizabeth Warren, as well as Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Maria Elvira Salazar, Anna Paulina Luna, Lauren Boebert and Senator Marsha Blackburn.
560,000 comments on their recent Instagram posts were gathered as part of this study, which found that “1 in 25 comments – over 20,000 – were identified as likely to be ‘toxic’ by Google’s Perspective AI tool.”
Delving further into the sentiment of these comments, researchers reported 1,000 of the worst, which included sexist and racist abuse, death and rape threats, as well as comments which violated Instagram’s own community guidelines. Of these, Instagram’s community guidelines review process allowed for 93% to remain on the platform.
“Instagram must enforce its existing rules against violent threats and abuse and work with experts in gender-based violence to ensure its current policies align with the lived reality of women and marginalized people in public life. All platforms should be required to be clear on how they enforce their rules and allow visibility and scrutiny of the actions they take to address abuse,” Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate wrote in an introduction to the report.
For context as to what kinds of comments were among the worst, a selection including: “Hope someone leaves you for…dead in a ditch”, “She would sound better with a f*cking gag in her mouth”, and “You complete evil f***ing b*tch, the devil has a hot place in hell reserved for you” were among comments found. But anyone who has spent any time even casually viewing comments under the posts of prominent women politicians, knows that this kind of vitriol is all too common.
Alarmingly, the study also found 221 of the 1,000 accounts reported by researchers to Instagram had targeted politicians several times in the space of half a year, meaning they were repeatedly targeting these figures’ posts, time and time again.
Researchers discovered that Instagram specifically failed to act on 92% of comments targeting Vice President Kamala Harris, specifically, in the weeks following her announcement of presidential candidacy. Instagram failed to act on sexist comments claiming she is “blowjobbing to the top” and racist comments that she is “VP because you are brown and without a penis” went unaddressed after a week of being reported by researchers.
Cindy Southworth, head of women’s safety at Meta, said in an emailed statement to NBC News: “We provide tools so that anyone can control who can comment on their posts, automatically filter out offensive comments, phrases or emojis, and automatically hide comments from people who don't follow them.
"We work with hundreds of safety partners around the world to continually improve our policies, tools, detection and enforcement, and we will review the Centre for Countering Digital Hate report and take action on any content that violates our policies.”
