The Internet is at Risk of Driving Women Away
upstart writes:
If harassment isn't tackled soon, many women will go permanently offline to avoid online abuse:
2023 will be the year that women leave the internet. Women already face enormous risks online. A Pew Research report of a US survey shows that one-third of young women report having been sexually harassed online and that women report being more upset by these experiences and seeing it as a bigger problem than men do. A UNESCO study of journalists found that 73 percent of women surveyed had experienced online violence, and 20 percent said that they had experienced physical attacks or had been abused offline in connection to online abuse. In response, women journalists reported self-censoring, withdrawing from online interactions, and avoiding interacting with their audiences. Filipino-American journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa wrote about the online abuse that she faces, at one point receiving an average of over 90 hate messages per hour. After she investigated wrote about campaign-finance irregularities around then-presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilian journalist Patricia Campos Mello's employer received hundreds of thousands of harassing WhatsApp messages and threats of physical confrontation-so much so that her employer, the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, was forced to hire a bodyguard for her. She also had to cancel all events for a month. What both women shared was that they dared question power while being visible on social media.
It isn't just famous or highly visible women who are facing enough online abuse to consider leaving social media. A YouGov poll commissioned by the dating app Bumble showed that almost half of women age 18 to 24 received unsolicited sexual images within the past year. UK Member of Parliament Alex Davies-Jones put the phrase "dick pic" into the historical record during the debate on the UK Online Safety Bill when she asked a male fellow MP if he had ever received one. It is not, as she said, a rhetorical question for most women.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.