(NewsNation) — A new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Instagram failed to address 93% of abusive comments made toward high-profile female politicians.
The study collected 560,000 sexually explicit, racist and abusive comments left on 10 female politicians’ pages, both Republican and Democrat.
The politicians included Democrats Vice President Kamala Harris, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jasmine Crockett, Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Republican politicians were Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Maria Elvira Salazar, Anna Paulina Luna, Lauren Boebert and Sen. Marsha Blackburn.
TikTok and X get most of the criticism these days when it comes to abusive content, but CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed wanted to see if the platforms owned by Meta are doing any better.
“We actually had our researchers go and find these toxic comments, verify that they broke the rules, then report them (to Meta),” he said.
Ahmed’s team reported 1,000 comments to the platform. A week later, 926 remained unaddressed.
“We wanted to see (if) they have the will to act when we hand them the content on a silver platter … 93% of the time, they failed to do anything,” Ahmed said.
Ahmed said more women running for office has “enriched” American politics, but when young people see how much abuse women politicians get online, they will think twice about whether they would want to enter politics.
“What is the moral justification for allowing someone to threaten to rape a female politician? What is the utility? What is the enrichment to our society that comes with people showering Black women politicians with the N-word? I really can’t see why Instagram thinks it’s fine to do that to anyone.”
Susanna Gibson, a Democrat who recently ran for a House seat in Virginia, was the subject of online abuse after an opponent shared evidence that she livestreamed sex acts with her husband on a pornographic website.
“It is absolutely awful, and we know that online gender violence and abuse is a tool that they use to silence women other marginalized communities and deter us from wanting to enter public office,” Gibson told NewsNation.
77% of the comments contained gender terms, such as the word rape. The study also noted that many of the comments come from repeat offenders.
In a statement, the head of women’s safety at Meta told NewsNation: “We provide tools so that anyone can control who can comment on their posts, automatically filter out offensive comments, phrases, or emojis and automatically hide comments from people who don’t follow them. We work with hundreds of safety partners around the world to continually improve our policies, tools, detection, and enforcement, and we will review the CCDH report and take action on any content that violates our policies.”
