25 Nov 2024 Call to monitor misogyny on social media for the 16 Days of Activism

The goalpost towards ending violence against women and girls began shifting swiftly three decades ago with growth in the popularity of the Internet.

Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) has continued to morph and spread in alarming ways ever since, fuelled by a range of drivers, among them:

• the anonymity provided by the Internet
• society’s normalization of online hate directed at women and girls
• the rise of anti-gender digital movements
• laxity in accountability by technology companies
• lack of consensus among States that TFGBV is actually violence

To mark the 33rd edition of the annual 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence this year, the United Nations in its UNiTE campaign “calls for concrete actions, including holding perpetrators accountable, and accelerating action through well-resourced national strategies and increased funding to women’s rights movements.”

Civil society, informed by a commitment to secure equal rights and justice for all, have a responsibility to intervene.

Social media watching as tool to stop TFGBV

WACC invites you to take action by participating in the Global Gender-focussed Observatory of Social Media. The Observatory seeks to gather globally comparable, consistent, and reliable data on TFGBV at the same time as it builds critical digital media literacy on a world scale.

An example is provided by the recent implementation by our partner Uganda Media Women’s Association (UMWA) of the social media watch methodology WACC has developed based on that of the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP).

UMWA’s monitoring revealed that over 50% of misogynistic posts on X (formerly Twitter), whether targeting a specific woman or all women in general, focus on body-shaming. While men, women, groups, and organisations are responsible for perpetrating online misogyny, men tend to post such content more than any other category of social media user; over 6 out of 10 such posts are by individual males.

#StopTFGBV: 3 ways to take action

1.      Become a Social Media Watcher

Let us know you want to participate in the global social media watch.

2.      Invite Others to Join

Gather friends, family and colleagues to form a social media watch team. Download our training toolkit to learn how to apply the data collection tools. Monitor as a team, then share your findings with us.

3.      Support the Observatory

Contribute funding or in-kind partnerships to support expansion of the global effort. Contact us for details.

Top image: Raising digital media literacy in India with WACC partner Ideosync Media Combine. Credit: Ideosync Media Combine