A look at the private direct messages of five prominent women on Instagram found a torrent of harassment, including pornographic images and threats of physical and sexual violence, while the perpetrators typically faced little to no repercussions, according to a new report released Wednesday.
The report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an international nonprofit, was far from the first to identify the urgent need for social media titans to take further steps to curb harassment on their platforms. Many women who use Instagram, especially those with a lot of followers, have consistently reported feeling unsafe, with proponents saying the relentless harassment threatens to cut women off from one of the world’s most popular online platforms.
But by opening their thousands of inbound private messages to researchers, the five high-profile women enabled an in-depth analysis of the misogyny they face outside of the public eye, and how a tech company is dealing with it. Imran Ahmed, the nonprofit’s chief executive, wrote that Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, “has created an environment for abuse and harmful content to thrive.”
“The intended effect of the abuse and trauma of the constant barrage is simple: to drive women off platforms, from public life, and further marginalize their voices,” he said.
Instagram has challenged the report’s conclusions in a statement, pointing to measures it had taken to limit harassment. Users can filter specific words from DMs and comments, disable the ability of strangers to send DMs, or hide comments and DMs from users who don’t follow or have recently followed them. It blurs out images sent in DMs by people who don’t follow you in an effort to hide unwanted sexual images, and removes a wide variety of offensive content.
“While we disagree with many of the CCDH’s conclusions, we do agree that the harassment of women is unacceptable,” Cindy Southworth, chief of women’s safety at Meta, said in a statement. “That’s why we don’t allow gender-based hatred or any threat of sexual violence, and last year we announced stronger protections for female public figures.”
According to the report, Instagram’s policies failed to protect the five women from a wide range of misogyny and threats.
The women represented a range of public figures, who were diversely prominent in entertainment, activism and journalism. Amber Heard, an actress, has 4.1 million followers, while Jamie Klinger, an activist who founded the Reclaim These Streets group after Sarah Everard’s death in London last year, has about 3,500 followers. The group also included Rachel Riley, a TV presenter in Britain; Bryony Gordon, a journalist and author; and Sharan Dhaliwal, founder of the South Asian culture magazine Burnt Roti.
When messages are sent by someone who doesn’t follow you, they get pushed aside in a side folder labeled “Requests.” It is often a cesspool for female public figures.
The report found that of the 8,717 DMs analysed, about one in 15 violated Instagram rules about abuse and harassment, including 125 examples of image-based sexual abuse.
“On Instagram, anyone can privately send you something that should be illegal,” Ms Riley said in the report. “If they did it on the street, they would be arrested.”
When examining the accounts that sent abusive messages, 227 of the 253 remained active for at least a month after they were reported. Forty-eight hours after they were reported, 99.6 percent of accounts remained online. (Instagram said accounts will temporarily lose the ability to send direct messages after an initial attack and will be banned after a number of additional violations it hasn’t disclosed.)
The report called for stricter regulation and accused big tech companies of not being able to regulate themselves. Their pledges to end harassment were toothless and secondary to the purpose of profit, the report said.
In the meantime, women were left to work out their own coping strategies. Some choose not to respond to the direct messages, but Ms. Klinger said that was not an option for her, as she sometimes receives press requests to talk about her activism.
Ms. Heard said the experience, and the inability to do much about it, had increased her paranoia, outrage and frustration.
“Social media is how we interact with each other today and that medium is pretty much off limits for me,” she said in the report. “That’s the sacrifice I made, the compromise, the deal I made for my mental health.”
