Twitter Is Failing Women, Says Amnesty International

All eyes are on Facebook right now but it’s not the only part of the Internet where people are behaving badly. Today Amnesty International have celebrated 12 years of Twitter by publishing a report which finds that Twitter is still failing to stop online violence and abuse against women. The site, they say, is a toxic environment for women.

In their report #ToxicTwitter, Amnesty have interviewed more than 80 women, including politicians, journalists and other users across the UK and USA. These women have exposed the extent to which twitter is failing to respect women’s rights. As a result amnesty are warning that the platform needs to take tangible and concrete steps to demonstrate how it ‘identifies, addresses and prevents violence and abuse against women on the platform’.

Last year it was revealed that Diane Abbot receives half of all online abuse targeted at women politicians in research also conducted by Amnesty. In this new report they cite examples of women receiving death threats, rape threats and racist, transphobic and homophobic abuse on Twitter. ‘Public figures, MPs and journalists are often particular targets’, they say ‘but people who aren’t in the public eye are also experiencing abuse, especially if they speak out about issues like sexism and use campaign hashtags’.

In a survey of 1,000 British women, 78% told Amnesty that women who hold opinions don’t think that Twitter is a place that they can share those ideas without receiving violence or abuse. Amnesty asked those women whether they had reported the abuse they received? They said that they had reported multiple instances of abuse but very few of them reported receiving a response from Twitter. Worse still, on numerous occasions, women told Amnesty how the content of abusive tweets they reported was said ‘not to be in breach of Twitter’s community standards’.

Amnesty’s report ultimately draws two conclusions:

Twitter fails to let users know how it interprets and enforces its policies or how it trains content moderators to respond to reports of violence and abuse;

Twitter’s response to abuse is inconsistently enforced - sometimes reports of abuse are not responded to at all - meaning content stays on the platform despite violating the rules.

The Director of Amnesty International UK, Kate Allen, said ‘for far too long Twitter has been a space where women can too easily be confronted with death or rape threats, and where their genders, ethnicities and sexual orientations are under attack’.

Allen went on to say that the ‘wave of solidarity and activism from women around the world’ embodied by movements like #MeToo, which have relied heavily on social media, is proof that women need spaces where they can ‘speak out without fear of violence and abuse’. As things stand, she said, ‘the trolls are currently winning, because despite repeated promises, Twitter is failing to do enough to stop them’.

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Prominent politicians like the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, Leader of the Women’s Equality party Sophie Walker, Scottish Labour’s Ruth Davidson and Labour’s Kezia Dugdale, have spoken out about the abuse they receive daily in support of Amnesty’s #ToxicTwitter campaign. Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, said she had received threats of sexual violence and been told by one Twitter user that they would like to ‘lynch’ her.

The online abuse of women remains widespread, and not just amongst women in the public eye. Last year, Amnesty commissioned a poll that showed how widespread online abuse of women is in the UK, with one in five women having suffered online abuse or harassment. Almost half of the women said the abuse or harassment they received was sexist or misogynistic, with a worrying 27% saying it threatened sexual or physical assault.

Responding to Amnesty’s findings, Twitter said they disagreed with the suggestion that they weren’t doing enough. The platform said that it cannot simply ‘delete hatred and prejudice from society’ and that they had made more than 30 changes to its platform in the past 16 months to improve safety, including taking more action on abusive tweets.

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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.