Top tech companies are talking to grassroots organisations across the globe to organise a fightback on their platforms against online abuse, hate speech, misogyny and stalking.
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Facebook, Twitter and Google are reaching out to women’s groups, NGOs and communities in Africa, America, India, Europe and the Middle East as the scale of abuse online continues to increase.
But their attempts to foster a “counter-speech” movement to challenge the violent misogyny, racism, threats, intimidation and abuse that flood social media platforms have prompted some of the communities they are trying to empower to question whether they are ducking their own responsibilities.
Sarah Green, of the End Violence against Women coalition, said: “Any moves by social media companies to support, encourage and empower individuals and groups to resist and counter abuse is very welcome.
“But we can’t say that’s the whole answer – we wouldn’t say that harassment and assault of women in the street should simply be dealt with by victims fighting back. We need to keep reviewing whether there is an adequate legal and policing response, and whether social media companies are doing enough through their own policies and practices towards perpetrators of abuse as well as victims.”
The news comes as the Guardian launches a major new series called the Web We Want on the darker side of online comments and efforts to foster better conversations online. It will include experiences from around the world and research on the Guardian’s own below the line comment threads.
Facebook’s US-based head of global safety, Antigone Davis, has recently overseen a series of global round-table discussions with women’s groups in India, Africa, Europe and the Middle East involving more than 120 organisations and activists.
Google, too, is in the early phases of global research into how hate, harassment, misinformation and intimidation are used online, and Twitter is engaged with women’s groups and NGOs, prosecutors and the police to find out how it can better tackle abuse. Their actions come as police in the UK say the scale of online abuse and intimidation threatens to overwhelm them.
Davis said the one thing that all the people she had spoken to had in common was a desire to understand the tools and resources available to them to allow them to participate fully on the platforms and shut down abusers and harassers.
She said the evidence from the meetings was that social media was overwhelmingly positive for the women and girls, from helping them build small businesses to enabling them to form community groups to combat domestic violence. “When we were in India talking to women who use Facebook, it was heartwarming to hear these women saying that the best way to counter abuse they had found was to mobilise our supporters to come together online. That was something we were hearing from this community and this is something we know is happening and we are researching further.”
She said Facebook had the tools in place to help counter hate speech, from blocking, to unfriending, to faster responses to reporting abuse and a ban on the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. “So it is about raising awareness globally about these tools,” she said. “That is what we need to do.”
Internet safety experts, however, say while the tech companies encourage their users to challenge abuse, they have an unacceptable level of secrecy shrouding the true extent of their internal efforts to counter abuse and intimidation on their platforms.
Twitter, Google and Facebook refuse to publish information on how many agents they employ to investigate reports of abuse; the scale and type of reports they receive; or the level of satisfaction of complainants. Facebook would only say it employed “several hundred” agents to deal with abuse reports – for a community of 1.6 billion users and for 24/7 coverage. Twitter said it had “more than 100 employees” operating round the clock for its user base of 320 million. Google refuses to say how many employees investigate reports of abuse. However, the company is considering including more information on the number of abuse reports and take-down requests it receives in its transparency reports.
John Carr, a British government adviser on internet safety for children and young people, said: “There is a fundamental problem in this whole area and that is the complete lack of information about what is actually happening on these major platforms. These companies have become the 21st-century public utilities. It would be completely unacceptable for an electricity or water company or the police to say ‘we cannot give out that information’.”
“They need to be more open and straightforward about what the scale of the problem is, and their response to it. We do need more community engagement but we want to know what the companies themselves are doing and they are refusing to release that information.”
Research has consistently shown that women, in particular young women, experience the most severe forms of abuse, unwanted contact, sexual harassment, rape threats and stalking online. A study last month in Australia warned that the abuse of women online is at risk of becoming “an established norm in digital society”.
Victims of abuse have described to the Guardian their frustration at the lack of action being taken by the major tech companies and law enforcement in the US, Australia and the UK.
Luciana Berger, MP for Liverpool Wavertree and Shadow Cabinet Minister for Mental Health, who has suffered repeated and ongoing anti Semitic abuse on social media, said: “It is a sad reality that whilst online hate is such a serious and growing problem the response from social media companies has been so slow and inadequate.
“It should not be left to the victims to have to battle against online racism on their own. Social media companies must fulfil their responsibility to their users and bring forward the robust action that is long overdue and get to grips with this problem.”
However, Nick Pickles, head of policy in the UK at Twitter, said hate speech and abuse were not something created by the internet, but existed within society. Twitter, he said, was striving to empower progressive counter narratives on its platform as a way of combating abuse.
“Tech companies cannot simply delete misogyny from society,” he said. “The idea that abusive speech or behaviour didn’t exist before the internet is simply false. Intolerance, in all its forms, is a deeply rooted societal problem.”
Pickles said it was nonsense to suggest there was a simple algorithm to detect abuse. “No such magical algorithm exists and, if it did, it wouldn’t be that simple to implement because of the complexity of understanding sentiment and context.
“This issue is fundamentally complex and tech companies are doing more. Safety is at the forefront of everything we do at Twitter.”
He cited innovative measures such as Twitter’s investment in creating a tool that could detect multiple anonymous accounts along with blocking, muting and bystander reporting, which was bearing fruit.
Sian Hawkins, campaigns and public affairs manager for Women’s Aid in the UK, praised the tech companies for making a concerted effort around abuse and for their ongoing discussions with women’s groups.
“We are hopeful that is a trend that will continue across lots of major leaders in the industry,” she said. “But there needs to be accountability and an acceptance within the industry that these platforms can put women at risk.”
Early research by tech companies into the effectiveness of “counter speech” in challenging and diminishing hate speech has brought disappointing results.
Five months ago Demos carried out pilot research for Facebook on how community-driven counter speech might play a critical role in shutting out hate speech in Europe by analysing interactions with populist rightwing pages. The researchers collected public posts and interaction data from the public Facebook pages of 150 far-right and counter-speech pages from the UK, France, Italy, and Hungary.
The report concluded counter speech did little to diminish the spreading of racist views. It concluded: “Counter-speech pages are not as active as populist rightwing pages … If they wish to reach more people, France and Italian counter-speech pages should produce more content. In the UK, counter-speech pages have more contributors, but they interact less frequently than contributors to populist rightwing pages.”