Sarah Harte: I’d rather eat my innards than deal with inevitable abuse of Twitter

Social Democrats leader Holly Cairns, Virgin Media news correspondent Zara King, and Labour councillor Michelle Hall all spoke out about online abuse.

CYBER misogyny or cyber violence might drive women entirely from the internet unless we tackle online abuse and harassment of women, according to Wired UK, a magazine that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, politics, and the economy. “2023 will be the year women leave the internet,” it states.

Some will sigh at another over-the-top prediction about violence against women. More cribbing. And while it’s true that men are also abused online by faceless keyboard warriors (or keyboard cowards, as I think of them), women face a particularly vicious and often highly sexualised type of abuse. Such abuse may be holding them back in their careers.

Two weeks ago, when Holly Cairns was elected leader of the Social Democratic Party, she spoke about the online abuse she has received as a politician. In January, she said she might never have run for election had she known the level of abuse she would face in the course of her job.

When former Sinn Féin MEP Liadh Ní Riada recently stepped down as the party’s general election hope for Cork North-West, she described leaving “the vicious game of politics” as “a huge relief”, pointing out that while online abuse of politicians across the board was getting worse, female representatives were “targeted very unfairly”.

Last year, an ongoing global Unesco study of journalists found that 73% of women surveyed had experienced online violence. Many female journalists have spoken about the abuse they have encountered.

In January, Virgin Media News correspondent Zara King said she had taken a step back from Twitter.

“I felt that Twitter wasn’t a hospitable place for females, particularly female journalists,” she said.

While it would be good for my job to be part of a broader online conversation on Twitter, I’d rather eat my innards than deal with the inevitable psychological abuse.

Aileen Moynagh, who works for BBC News NI, was subjected to “harrowing” online harassment by a teenage boy over five months. In 2022, her harasser was given a six-month deferred sentence. He also made threats against a second journalist. She wants the law to change so that social media companies cannot hide behind the behemoth General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Two weeks ago, it was reported that Facebook said posts about Labour Party councillor Michelle Hall did not breach its community standards even though they used sexist and misogynistic language.

Labour leader Ivana Bacik said she was taken aback by Facebook’s decision to allow such material to remain online. She said: “Social media companies like Facebook must take responsibility for the abuse and harassment their platforms are facilitating.”

She’s right but the fact that Facebook (Meta) gave this response isn’t a great surprise. The complaints procedures of social media companies referred to as “notice and takedown procedures” often don’t bear fruit. 

A complainant must fill out online forms identifying offensive content, arguing that it’s harmful to them and has breached the social media company’s terms of use. Frequently, a company will be slow to revert, if at all.

There is some good news.  The Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022, which was signed into law last December, creates new guidelines for social media platforms as to how quickly they must respond to complaints from their users. It also provides oversight on how tech companies moderate user-generated content. 

Under the legislation, an individual complaints mechanism allowing users to complain directly in respect of online content will be introduced on a phased basis.

The Media Commission established under the act will have broad investigative and enforcement powers and will be an important new regulator of the technology sector in Ireland and the EU.

The Government is to be commended for this first attempt to regulate powerful tech companies, but it remains to be seen how it pans out in real time.

And while the act, aimed primarily at improving online safety for children, is to be welcomed at a time when our children are encountering horrific content on the internet, more needs to be done to help women who suffer disproportionately from a high level of sexualised abuse.

If a woman feels that her online abuse tips into the criminal, she can contact the gardaí. The Non-Fatal Offences against the Person Act 1997 Act provides some protection against cyber harassment, criminalising persistently following, pestering, or communicating with a person to seriously interfere with their “peace and privacy”.

However, a one-off post is not covered, even where that post is disseminated widely and is in cyberspace permanently. This is a lacuna that needs to be addressed.

Coco’s Law 2020 deals with intimate image-based abuse, which is often called revenge porn. However, cyber-flashing, or the sending of what are commonly known as ‘dick pics’, is not criminalised behaviour and needs to be.

A Washington Post article last month detailed how, more and more, trolls attack female journalists. It called for “the roving crowd of trolls and haters” to be “identified and banished” by the social media giants.

The obvious, more expeditious way to make trolls accountable is for Twitter, Meta, and Instagram to force users to use their real names.

In January, an Irish Examiner editorial stated that “reports of increasing abuse against female politicians have led to calls for
verified identities on social media and accountability of users, [but] it should not have had to come to this”.

Ms Hall faced a constant stream of abuse and intimidation online and had to take a day off work after a particularly abusive post. A key characteristic of cyber harassment is that it’s borderless; it penetrates your home and your head. It torments a person in a specific way that undermines confidence and leaves lasting scars.

After her harasser was sentenced, Ms Moynagh said: “Abuse online should be taken seriously and have consequences for perpetrators hiding behind a mobile or keyboard.”

Abusers dissociate their online selves from their real-world selves and feel free to say the thing they wouldn’t say to a person’s face — researchers call it the online disinhibition effect.

The ability to express your opinion anonymously is arguably an important element of freedom of expression, allowing a person to expose wrongdoing and speak against political oppression, but tech companies must be forced to sort the cyber wheat from the chaff and break open their walled gardens where necessary.

This is itself a problem because while social media companies have platform content moderators, they are under huge pressure and given too little time to carry out assessments of content. This is completely unacceptable from rich-as-Croesus tech companies.

Europe is taking the regulation of tech companies far more seriously than the US. A raft of new EU acts look set to bring the tech giants to heel by compelling them to make their platforms more open. 

But even if you ban or criminalise behaviour, it doesn’t make it go away. That misogynistic attitude is still there pulsating beneath the surface and says something larger about how women are perceived in public life.

Last year, one man described me online as “a whinging feminazi” and said: “Sarah would want to get down from her soapbox and stop lecturing men about violence against women.” 

The undertone of this message suggests a certain male anger when women raise their voices or attempt to ‘exercise power’ in the public arena. Not to be too gloomy but there are days when it feels like we’re living in a world where women’s humanity is constantly undermined.