Research in Latin America suggests that attacks on media workers via Twitter are fueled by hostility to journalists, especially women journalists, perceived as expressing opinions in a polarized society.
The effect of the attacks is that many of the journalists surveyed in the study say that they self-censor.
This is one of the findings of a pioneering project on digital gender violence in seven countries of Latin America.
It was carried out between April 2019 and April 2020, thanks to IPDC funding, and implemented by Sentiido of Colombia and Comunicación para la Igualdad of Argentina.
Focusing on digital gender violence on the social network Twitter, the research project analyzed the accounts of 66 journalists from Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, who were targeted by online attacks.
They also surveyed through data mining and data analysis tools the accounts of seven female and three male journalists per country, and carried out interviews with 28 journalists.
The case study is not necessarily representative of the wider situation, but it helps to signal similarities and differences in the attacks, and the perceptions of journalists involved.
The findings suggest that the main reason for being attacked is a woman journalist’s political ideas, and to a lesser extent, their professional work. Most of those studied are accused, regardless of their gender, of working for one political side or another.
The study links this phenomenon to Twitter‘s specificity as a space dominated by contemporary political debate content. High polarization in society both feeds into and is boosted by the algorithms of social media.
But Sandra Chaher, director of Comunicación para la Igualdad, and Lina Cuellar, director of Sentiido, also point to the growing role of journalists as influencers on social media whereby people follow journalists based on their work in the media, but also seek insights into the journalist’s public/private life.
The attacks suffered by journalists have very concrete effects on their right to freedom of expression. Over two thirds of the journalists interviewed (68 percent) either restricted the frequency of their posts, temporarily withdrew from Twitter, or stopped posting about issues that could generate attacks. This infringement of journalists’ freedom of expression has consequences for the rest of society, as their withdrawal from social media—albeit temporarily or selectively— silences voices from the public sphere.
At the same time, it was observed that violence on Twitter was often accompanied by attacks elsewhere: 75 percent of the journalists interviewed said they were also attacked or threatened on other social media, in public or via their telephones or email accounts.
Many journalists facing attacks build personal strategies such as temporary or selective withdrawals, blocking attackers, or limiting their reading of notifications. If most understand that violence is part of the rules of play on Twitter, the overwhelming majority (95 percent) state that they have felt negative emotions such as rage, fear or shame as a result of the attacks.
For media organizations, the personal level of attacks sometimes makes it difficult to see the issue of online violence as relevant on a professional level. Eighty-six percent of the journalists surveyed reported that the media organizations they work for had not given them any digital training prior to the attacks, and for only 25 percent of respondents did this happen subsequently. In turn, only 14.5 percent of respondents stated that the media outlets they work for have digital security protocols in place.
The study also showed that digital violence differed according to gender.
Women journalists face many more attacks that: question their mental capacity (+10%); deploy sexist expressions (+20%); and/or mention their physical appearance (+30% - this indicator is twice as high in Argentina and Uruguay.)
Hashtags used to attack female journalists include in many cases diminutives of their names, infantilizing them, a situation that did not occur in any of the attacks on men analyzed within the framework of this study.
Nor were any of men subjected to technology-based sexual abuse, while this happened in the case of 5 percent of the women surveyed.
Among the respondents, women journalists reported the violence to Twitter much more than their male counterparts: 71 percent against 43 percent of men. Women were also more active in modifying their digital practices following attacks: 62 percent reported doing something against 43 percent for men. According to the study, it appears that men accept more readily than women that violence is a «rule of the game» on social media.
The study also showed that journalists and particularly women journalists are also attacked specifically for covering feminist issues, such as the legalization of abortion.
The report also found evidence of coordinated gender-based trolling against journalists by four governments—or sectors that support the governing party—in the region.
Read more about it here – in Spanish for the complete report and here – for a summary in English.