Study shows high-profile women face “an epidemic of misogynist abuse” on Instagram

nme.com:

a new report issued by the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), high-profile women on Instagram are targeted virulently by sexist trolls, with one in every 15 of over 8,700 messages that the organisation surveyed containing content that violated Instagram’s policies on bullying in harassment.Per The Guardian, researchers for the CCDH combed through 8,717 messages sent the accounts of five high-profile women active on Instagram: Aquaman star Amber Heard, Countdown co-presenter Rachel Riley, activist Jamie Kingler, journalist Bryony Gordon and Burnt Roti Magazine founder Sharan Dhaliwal.

What they discovered, according to Imran Ahmed – chief executive director of the CCDH – was that “Instagram systematically fails to enforce appropriate sanctions and remove those who break its rules”.

He noted that the CCDH’s ‘Hidden Hate’ report turned up “one of the worst-ever failure rates” in the organisation’s history, finding that Instagram failed to take any action on 90 per cent of the abusive content sent to the women participating in the survey.“The intended effect of the abuse and the trauma of its constant barrage is simple: to drive women off platforms, out of public life, and to further marginalize their voices,” Ahmed continued, pointing out that “in the absence of effective tools to stop the stream of harmful content, women have been forced to find their own solutions, often tailoring their content to avoid provoking abusers or avoiding posting altogether to reduce their visibility”.Ahmed went on to claim that Instagram’s inbuilt safety measures – primarily centred around algorithms designed to pick up on and flag problematic keywords, as well as a large team of human moderators – proved “ineffective”, and “shift[s].