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Online Violence Against Women in Politics - Comparative Trends, Impacts and Responses
- 1. Online Violence Against Women in Elections Gabrielle Bardall, PhD Gender Advisor (Senior Consultant), International Foundation for Electoral Systems Presented at “Breaking Gender Barriers: Taking USAID Programming to the Next Level” Tuesday, November 19, 2019, Washington DC
- 3. Defining “VAWP-Online” VAWP- ONLINE Direct criminal acts Explicit threats, criminal harassment, cyberstalking Harmful speech Abusive, threatening, shaming, demeaning rhetoric and online discourse Collective patterns and trends + Individual cases
- 4. IFES Research • Empirical data gathering, observation-based content • Focus groups / Interviews • Social media analysis (7 countries): – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Libya, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, USA, Zimbabwe
- 5. Initial Findings - Contours - Impacts and Trends - Measurement
- 6. Contours • VAWP-Online is globally pervasive, but culturally specific • Attacks against women tend to go viral more often than attacks against men • Women can face more intense forms of violence • Women often face more sustained levels of online abuse • VAWP Online has a distinct geography • VAWP-Online varies according to candidate profile, electoral system and quota design
- 7. Impacts and Trends • VAWP-Online can have a chilling effect but is also driving awareness and change • Homophobia: keeping politics a heteronormative male domain • VAWP-Online and Multiple Marginalizations • VAWP-Online as a tool of hostile foreign political meddling • High levels of impunity and little regulation are holding back progress
- 8. Measurement • Types of violence • Tactics of violence • Different cyber “spheres” • Categories of potential targets • Levels of perpetrator engagement • Redefining the metrics of violence • Interpreting negative/absent data
- 9. Measurement Challenges • Distinguishing types of perpetrators • Distinguishing sexual threats of a physical nature from those of a moral nature • Connecting incidents into interpretable behavioral patterns (cyber- stalking, etc) • Due to volatility of social media, we should study the “giants” separately from others • Confidence testing data • Integrating images
- 10. Responses to VAWP-Online • Institutional and policy responses • Platform responses • Community and cultural responses
- 11. Acknowledgments USAID – CEPPS Technical Leadership Awards Global Affairs Canada National Democratic Institute Gift Murombo Rebecca Kuperberg Gina Chirillo & Otito Greg-Obi
Editor's Notes
- IFES is a global leader in democracy promotion. IFES advances electoral integrity and security and promotes the democratic rights of all people. Since 1987, IFES has worked in more than 145 countries. IFES promotes political participation, justice and equal rights for women and men around the world. IFES is a recipient of USAID support. This presentation draws significantly content developed under a technical leadership project through CEPPS, 2017-2019 ------- Women are systematically subject to gender-based online aggression linked to the exercise of their political and civil rights and expression of free speech. No exceptions: online abuse of women in politics is universal and has major impacts. In this presentation we will discuss: What is online violence against women and how does it manifest in the electoral context? How can the impact of online violence against women in elections be measured? How are organizations like IFES working to address this phenomenon through programming?
- “VAWP-Online” is used here to reflect a range of harmful behaviors directed at women and girls who choose to engage in public leadership and in politics. As with “real world” violence, online violence occurs on a scale of different intensities. These can be distinct from each other or part of an escalating curve in any given case. These degrees of aggression can overlap or bleed into each other, but four different levels are broadly recognized .
- The phrase “VAWP-Online” is an umbrella term that refers collectively to a number of distinct harms including: Direct criminal acts (such as explicit threats, criminal harassment, cyberstalking) Harmful speech (Abusive, threatening, shaming, demeaning rhetoric and online discourse at different levels of intensity, as just seen) The term VAWP-Online includes collective patterns and trends + Individual cases
- Findings here are drawn from three primary research streams: Social media analysis (7 countries) inspired by our USAID CEPPS grant Qualitative research (focus groups, interviews, etc) in these countries and further afield Empirical observation, field interactions and reported incidents from across the countries where IFES works and partners Will not discuss methodology here, happy to provide information outside this presentation
- Talk now about initial findings that respond to the questions How does it manifest in the electoral context? How can the impact of online violence against women in elections be measured?
- VAWP-Online is globally pervasive, but culturally specific - Some types appear universal (i.e. sexual slurs), but often has a culturally specific face (e.g. witchcraft in Zim, KGB in Ukraine, Hollywood conspiracy in the US) Attacks against women tend to go viral more often than attacks against men - Happens because sensationalism and “shock value” are the currencies of social media. Women face greater constraints around social norms and behavior and when they break with those norms (or are accused of breaking norms), the shock factor is much greater, leading to the viral effect online. This worsens the negative impacts. Women can face more intense forms of violence - In many cases, we see political women receiving higher rates of death and rape threats and threats of other kinds of physical harm to themselves, their children, families and supporters. - Violence also spills over into real world violence Women often face more sustained levels of online abuse - As with all kinds of political discourse, VAWP-Online ebbs and flows with current events and electoral cycles. Women face more scrutiny and abuse at the height of election periods, as do men. However, in between election periods, when abusive content online tends to cool off for men, women continue to experience higher sustained levels of abuse. - Viral moments trigger cycles of VAWP-Online that can last for years and are part of the sustained levels of abuse VAWP Online has a distinct geography - VAWP-Online is concentrated in urban centers (especially capital cities where politics are hot topics) and its messages spread into peripheral areas and across borders. High density population centers are natural hubs for ICT-facilitated abuse because they tend to have greater levels of access to technology, wealth, connectivity and techno-literacy. - VAWP-Online content does not respect national borders. In every analysis, international diaspora hubs outside of the country are “hotspots” for online violence VAWP-Online varies according to candidate profile, electoral system and quota design - Local-level women v. high profile women have different experiences - VAWP-Online is often a backlash to cases where women are seen to challenge male-dominated spaces. Design factors of electoral systems and quota design can increase or lessen this effect. - Political ideological can play a role, but VAWP-Online more often appears to be an equal opportunity evil, not associated with political ideology
- VAWP-Online can have a chilling effect but is also driving awareness and change - VAWP-Online has multiple, contrasting impacts. It can silence women and have a chilling effect on participation and free speech. It can spark outrage, activate advocacy and drive change by bringing injustice to the surface. VAWP-Online also has the impact of shifting online engagement to different, more secure spaces. This reflects no increase or decrease in engagement, but rather moves existing engagement to different platforms. Homophobia: keeping politics a heteronormative male domain - VAWP-Online is not just about women, it is about keeping politics an exclusively masculine domain. One of the unanticipated findings of IFES’ social media analytics across all regions was the pervasive presence of homophobic content directed at both men and women candidates and civically active people (such as rights activists and civic leaders). VAWP-Online and Multiple Marginalizations - Research finds that “for women in politics, VAWP can also be informed by ability, sexuality, race and ethnicity, religion, national origin, language, religiosity, age, or geography. VAWP-Online as a tool of hostile foreign political meddling - VAWP-Online is employed as a strategy by some hostile foreign actors to undermine democracy and human rights. Authoritarian influencers such as Russia have increasingly engaged in information warfare and influence campaigns, using all forms of online abuse (incivility/information disorder/hate speech/violence) to sway political discourse and electoral outcomes abroad. These information warfare tactics include significant amounts of gender-specific attacks that we classify here as VAWP-Online. High levels of impunity and little regulation are holding back progress - Statement is self-evident
- Types of violence - not just about physical harm. Attacks may threaten the physical wellbeing of the target or her family, threaten sexual assault, attack the dignity of the individual through psychosocial aggression or imply economic harm. Tactics of violence - The four types of harm are executed through a vast array of tactics and malicious behaviors. Threats and shaming, doxing, swatting, flaming, google bombing, trolling, stalking, etc. Different cyber “spheres” - Cyberspace is multidimensional, from private messaging to public pages to the wild west of blogs and Twitter. VAWP-Online hops between this “ecosystem of cyber spaces” in any given incident. This needs to be accounted for in measurement. Categories of potential targets - VAWP-Online is not just about women politicians. It impacts both men and women who exercise their civil and political rights in a variety of ways. Journalists and election commissioners, for example, are common targets. It also has secondary victims: political staffers who might be the ones dealing with an MP’s social media account or re-traumatizing survivors of GBV that see this public content. This is also an issue for measurement. Levels of perpetrator engagement - “Real world” violence generally involves a single victim who is targeted by an identifiable perpetrator or group of perpetrators. Perpetrators of VAWP-Online are much more complex. Instead of a single perpetrator, VAWP-Online incidents are often characterized by dozens or even thousands of individuals contributing to a violent act. They may engage with different degrees of intensity and malice. We identify three degrees of perpetrator activity: direct perpetrators, indirect perpetrators, and “treacherous sympathizers.” Redefining the metrics of violence - Traditional reporting and data collection on election-related violence depends on counting isolated incidents with clearly identified perpetrators, locations and types of attack. The world of online violence requires very different metrics of measurement including volume, speed, and intensity of the content. Interpreting negative/absent data - Volume (or the lack of volume) should not always be taken at face value for 4 reasons: -- Social media analysis is very volatile and quantitative measures of the frequency of individual data points is heavily influenced by individual personalities, breaking scandals at any given time and the general political context of any given electoral event -- Measuring VAWP-Online through absolute volume of posts can be a circular problem: when attacks are successful in pushing women out of leadership, it silences them and can deter other women from speaking out. Thus, the places where VAWP-Online is most potent may be those places with the lowest absolute volumes of measurable online vitriol. -- relatively low volume of VAWP-Online can reflect women’s overall marginalization from political life rather than a safer online environment or higher levels of tolerance. Where there are few women leaders and low name recognition, absolute volume may be lower without reflecting differences in the actual hostile climate. -- measurement software is still catching up with the complex nature of this problem – abusive and threatening online content is a linguistic jungle. It involves dog-whistle comments, sarcasm, historic and cultural references and allusions. Also, sexually violent words and phrases are so deeply embedded in many languages that they are regularly used out of this context. This throws off data analysis algorithms. Without very careful research methods, VAWP-Online can easily be wildly over- or under-estimated and is always, at best, a sample.
- Institutional and policy responses Adapt GBV laws to cover hate speech and online violence Educate law enforcement Include in party codes of conduct, and encourage EMBs and party leadership to implement Protocols for disinformation and misconduct that either integrate gender explicitly or include gender in their implementation Platform responses Flag and remove content, keep records to identify perpetrators Incorporate into user agreements and codes of conduct Invest in digital literacy and accessible in-platform tools to combat online violence Combine AI and human-intelligence editorial and filters Community and cultural responses Educate journalists to 1) not engage in VAWP-Online and 2) recognize and report on it Protecting the watchdogs. The best watchdogs against online gendered disinformation, violence, etc, are frequently targeted themselves and vulnerable in other ways. Supporting women journalists. Women journalists are positioned to be frontline responders to VAWP-Online, but instead they are very frequently victims. Women journalists need protection from online threats. Feminist online security training for human rights defenders. Coping mechanisms for feminist rights defenders and advocates. Community resilience tactics Frontline activism Target vulnerable women populations for education (young girls, areas with low internet penetration, etc) and use traditional means to educate about tech