The 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.
The famous social networks Facebook, Twitter and Google are reaching out to women’s groups, NGOs and communities in Africa, America, Europe and the Middle East as the scale of abuse online continues to increase.
So these 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.
A fomous actor said, of the End Violence against Women coalition, (Any moves by social media companies to support, encourage and empower individuals and groups to resist and counter abuse is very welcome).
So the 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,Europe and the Middle East involving more than 121 organisations and activists.
Famous search engine Google, too, is in the early phases of global research into how hate, 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.
He 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.
So 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.
So internet experts, 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.
3 famouse social networks 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 1.5 billion users and for 24/6 coverage. Twitter said it had (more than 100 employees) operating round the clock for its user base of 321 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.
So all 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.
Said, MP for Liverpool Wavertree and Shadow Cabinet Minister for Mental Health, who has suffered repeated and ongoing anti Semitic abuse on social media, (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).
Social network 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.
Head of policy in the UK at Twitter, said hate speech and abuse were not something created by the internet, but existed within society. he said, was striving to empower progressive counter narratives on its platform as a way of combating abuse.
The Social tech companies cannot simply delete misogyny from society, So he said. (The idea that abusive speech or behaviour didn’t exist before the internet is simply false.
She said it was nonsense to suggest there was a simple algorithm to detect abuse. (This issue is fundamentally complex and tech companies are doing more. Safety is at the forefront of everything we do at Twitter).
Hopeful that is a trend that will continue across lots of major leaders in the industry, she said (There needs to be accountability and an acceptance within the industry that these platforms can put women at risk. Research by tech companies into the effectiveness of (counter speech) in challenging and diminishing hate speech has brought disappointing results. 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.
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