How to Respond to Online Gender-Based Violence

Online violence is perhaps difficult to see and understand if you’re not directly experiencing it, but the numbers show it’s a significant global problem. Globally, 85% of women have either directly faced online violence or witnessed it against other women. 50% of children (ages 10-18) across Europe have experienced at least one kind of cyberbullying in their lifetime. 73% of female journalists, globally, reported experiencing online attacks related to their work, with 20% reporting that online attacks had led to offline attacks on them. Approximately 50% of U.S. state-level elected officials have reported reluctance to communicate via social media because of online abuse. And again, globally, 60% of young activists face online harassment for posting human rights content.

TL;DR – Online violence is real, it is pervasive, and it is proliferating.

Online violence is a complex issue that transcends geographical, cultural, and socio-economic boundaries. It takes on various forms, including cyberbullying, doxxing, gender-based violence, hate speech, AI-generated fake pornography, non-consensual intimate imagery, and violent threats. The frequent targets of such attacks span across different individuals, communities, and geographies, often based on factors such as gender, race, religion, and sexual orientation. A disproportionate amount of online attacks are directed at women, leading to the creation of a whole new term: technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV). More often than not, when someone is receiving threats and harm on social media, the threats and harm are coming through on multiple social media platforms. Coordinated attack campaigns also often span across multiple platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, Snap, Telegram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X (Twitter), and more. 

I understand what it is like to experience online violence. In October 2022, around the beginning of the Woman Life Freedom movement, I became a target of a vicious series of online attacks. Throughout my experience, I learned a lot about what the platforms are doing (and not doing) to create a safer social media experience for all their users. I also learned about the wealth of resources that are available to support women, human rights activists, elected officials, journalists, public figures, children, and other vulnerable populations who are disproportionately at risk while online. My experience has led to the creation of pirth.org, where we are building the trust + safety and survivor support platform that I wish had existed when I began experiencing online violence. 

One of the pain points in my experience was in figuring out what to do to keep myself and my family safe. There are so many resources out there – and more than one supportive friend or colleague sent me links and pdfs containing long lists and roundups of resources. As grateful as I am for their thoughtfulness and support, I was also overwhelmed with all the options in front of me. Which ones were applicable to my situation? Which ones did I qualify for? Which ones should I pursue? Decision fatigue is real, and when you’re overwhelmed and your safety/security are threatened, one of the best things someone can do is give you a clear roadmap of next steps. That’s what we’re aiming for with pirth.org’s customized Action + Resource Lists.

A key component of pirth.org’s ability to provide immediate support to survivors via customized Action + Resource Lists is resource-mapping. Essentially, we are trying to create a comprehensive Global + Local Resource Library that catalogs support services available to those experiencing online attacks and gender-based violence. When a survivor reports a threat/harm that they receive and hits the “submit” button, the pirth.org platform immediately generates a customized Action + Resource List that gives them relevant resources and recommendations for their specific situation. 

There’s no better way to compile resources than through community and crowdsourcing. Inspired by the annual Wikimedia Hackathon, we decided to host a hackathon of our own – focusing on hacking together a digital Global + Local Resource Library. In the process, our goal was to convene and elevate the experience and expertise of survivors, human rights defenders, civil society practitioners, government officials, and more. We may be a tech platform, but cultivating community is every bit as critical to our work as the tech. 

Because online violence is a global problem, pirth.org is a global organization…and our hackathon needed to be globally accessible, too. We made the decision to host a hackathon that started on June 20 at 9:00am Australian Eastern Standard Time (for those doing the math, that’s 7:00pm US Eastern Standard Time on June 19th!) and ended at 7:00pm US Eastern Standard Time on June 20. 

During this 24-hour global hackathon, we worked collaboratively to identify, collect, and vet global and local resources available to those experiencing online attacks and gender-based violence in regional focus areas. This includes online and offline resources for digital and physical security, legal aid, shelter, mental health, helplines, etc. We were also joined by a phenomenal slate of speakers, including Afghan journalist Zahra Joya, Black Iranian Freetown-based filmmaker Priscillia Kounkou-Hoveyda, Omidyar Foundation Principal for Responsible Technology Wafa Ben-Hassine, Argentinian public servant and Obama Scholar Natalia Herbst, and LGBTQ+ activist and writer Charlotte Clymer.

One of the points that surfaced again and again in our speakers’ remarks was that the online environment, particularly social media, is not equally free and safe for all. Unfortunately, like most tools, social media platforms can be subverted for ill-intentioned, harmful, and/or life-threatening means. The platforms do not have a strong business or regulatory incentive to address the online violence that is sent/received on their platforms. As such, bot farms, bad actors, state and non-state cyber-armies, and individual perpetrators benefit from the capitalist and unregulated nature of the social media platforms. 

Regrettably, most social media platforms typically lack adequate reporting mechanisms and show limited responsiveness when users report instances of harassment. Some of the safety tools that have been developed – like Meta’s “Hidden Words” tool, which essentially enables users to ‘hide’ messages that contain certain words – put the onus on the user to try to prevent receiving threats and harm. This prevailing impunity of responsibility leaves survivors to fend for themselves. To date, social media platforms have demonstrated a reluctance to be transparent regarding the extent of online violence on their platforms, and reports of online violence are, more often than not, left unaddressed. 

We are already seeing how the advent of AI allows online violence – particularly technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) – to proliferate at greater speed and scale, particularly in the generation of fake pornographic content. 99% of pornographic content on the internet is of women. The consequences of online violence have both immediate and downstream impacts on our lives. Online violence, especially TFGBV, not only causes immediate psychological harm and suffering, but also has a chilling effect on womens’ willingness to participate in the discourse on social media. Moreover, experiencing and/or witnessing online violence deters many women from participation in political, social and cultural life – including running for elected office, or even participating as an election worker. Given that 80% of election workers in the United States are women, and we already have a shortage of poll workers – online violence has real and direct impacts on our democracy. Vulnerable and marginalized communities, human rights defenders and democracy advocates are particularly targeted, posing a threat to the very foundations of society and democracy. There is currently little, if any, mechanism to stop or even slow the growth of online violence. The lack of transparency and accountability has further hindered efforts to address this pervasive problem and create effective, global, scalable solutions.

At pirth.org, our theory of change is that the introduction of accountability and transparency will serve as a catalyst and spur safety solutions, as well as a deterrent against the proliferation of online violence. As the old adage goes…sunlight is the best disinfectant. That’s why our user-centric trust and safety reporting platform aggregates reports as data, publishes its data and analysis, and advocates for the creation and implementation of evidence-based online safety improvements, laws, and regulations. While we support survivors through our global resource-mapping and customized Action + Resource Lists, we also serve as an independent actor and organization that can evaluate threats and harm, escalate reports for accountability purposes, and elucidate the overall landscape of online safety and security – all with trust and transparency.

Whether your primary concern is for women’s wellbeing, children and teenagers’ mental health, ensuring journalists’ safety, defending democracy, protecting human rights, advancing social progress, or simply for a safer internet for all – we hope you’ll join us in leveraging pirth.org as both a source of support and a catalyst for change. We certainly have more to do, and we hope that you’ll join us in achieving our shared goals.