Online abuse of women is on the rise, but why aren't the police, government and social media doing more to stop it?
Warning: The text contains insults
I'm the BBC's first specialist disinformation reporter - and I receive abusive messages on social media every day.
Most are too offensive to share without editorial changes.
Trigger?
My reporting on the impact of online conspiracy theories and fake news.
I expect to be challenged and criticized - but misogynistic hatred directed at me has become a very regular occurrence.
The messages are loaded with gender-based insults and focus on rape, beheading and sexual acts.
Some are a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories - that I am "controlled by the Zionists", that I myself am responsible for raping babies.
Words with the letter "p" and the letter "j" are constantly used.
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It's not just about me - from politicians around the world and stars of reality shows Islando love, so to the doctors on the front line, I heard it from women who were exposed to the same kind of hatred.
New research, obtained by the BBC, suggests that women are more likely than men to experience this type of abuse, it's worse - and it's often combined with racism and homophobia.
I wanted to understand why this is happening, the threat it poses - and why social media, the police and the government aren't doing more about it.
That's why I set out to make a film for the BBC's Panorama program.
We set up a fake troll account on five of the most popular social media platforms to see if they promote misogynistic hate to such users.
Using an AI-generated photo, we designed our fake troll to look like the people who abused me.
Our troll engaged in content recommended by social networking platforms, but did not display any hate.
As part of the program, think-tank Demos conducted extensive research on abuse experienced by reality show contestants, analyzing more than ninety thousand posts and comments about them.
It was perhaps a surprising place to start, but programs like Islands of love they serve almost as a microcosm for society, allowing researchers to compare abuse directed at men and women from different backgrounds.
Their popularity also generates a lot of online conversation.
We discovered:
- Our troll account was recommended by Facebook and Instagram more and more content against women, some of which included sexual violence.
- Female reality show contestants - including those on this year's Love Island - have been disproportionately targeted on social media, with abuse often fueled by misogyny and mixed with racism.
- Draft proposals by which the UN asks social media to better protect women were shared exclusively with Panorama.
Offensive accounts intact
Social networking companies say they take online misogyny seriously - and have rules to protect users from abuse.
This means suspending, limiting or even shutting down accounts that send hate.
But my experience is that they often don't.
I reported some of the worst messages I've ever received on Facebook - including threats to come to my house to rape me and perform horrific sexual acts on me.
But months later, the account remained on Facebook, along with dozens of other Instagram and Twitter accounts that abused me.
My experience turns out to be part of a pattern.
New research by the Center for the Suppression of Digital Hate for this program shows that 97 percent of the 330 accounts that send messages of misogynistic abuse on Twitter and Instagram remained on the site after being reported.
Twitter and Instagram say they take action when their rules are violated, and closing accounts isn't the only option.
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Troll hunting
Curious about who was running the accounts that were abusing me - and other women - I started by looking at the profiles that were targeting me.
Most were men, located in Great Britain.
From calling me a "stupid cow" and telling me to "fuck off" to threatening to come find me and violently or sexually assault me, I am bombarded with gender-based insults over and over again.
Turns out they're real people - not bots.
One is a fan of the London Football Club Tottenham, like me.
Another likes a vegan diet.
One, whose account was anonymous, even gave away his location by tweeting delivery service Ocado complaining that it did not deliver to his postcode in Great Yarmouth.
I reached out to them - and one called Steve, a van driver in his sixties from the Midlands, agreed to speak to me on the phone.
The messages he sent me were less offensive than most of the abuse I get - mostly gender-based insults.
Like many of the account holders who have sent me hate messages, he is deep into online conspiracy theories.
But, like others, the abuse he gave me was, among other things, because I am a woman.
At first he told me he didn't think his messages were that bad - but I explained that they were just some of the many abusive messages pouring into my inbox.
"I was probably wrong. I'm a pretty fair man," he finally concluded.
He pointed out that he is actually a victim of hatred on the Internet "by people who believe in global warming and that September 11th happened".
They respond to the conspiracy theories he shares on social media.
I was hoping this might help him understand why hate is not the answer.
And I think at the end of our conversation he got the idea.
Our conversation got me thinking about what my trolls might be seeing on their social media feeds.
I wanted to see if social media algorithms were pushing more misogyny onto accounts similar to those that abuse women online.
So I created a fake online persona called Barry and posted him on five of the most popular social media platforms in the UK.
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All major social media companies say they do not promote hate on their platforms and are taking steps to stop it.
Each of them has algorithms that offer us content based on things we've posted, liked or watched in the past.
But it's hard to know what they offer to each user.
"The only way to do that is to manually create a profile and see what kind of bizarre situation the platform itself could get you into when you start following certain groups or pages," explains social media expert Chloe Coliver, who advised me on the experiment.
She works at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, dealing with extremism and disinformation on social networks.
Koliver has helped journalists before and advises me on how to run profiles in an ethical and realistic way - doing only what is necessary to test the algorithms.
Barry's accounts were based on multiple accounts that abused me.
Like my trolls, Barry was mostly interested in anti-vaxxer content and conspiracy theories, and followed a small amount of anti-women content.
He also posted some abuse on his own profile - so that the algorithms could detect from the beginning that he had an account that used offensive language about women.
But unlike my trolls, he didn't message any women directly.
For two weeks, I logged in every few days and followed the recommendations I posted on Barry's profiles, liked posts, and watched videos.
After just one week, the most popular pages to follow on both Facebook and Instagram were almost all misogynistic.
By the end of the experiment, Barry was receiving more and more anti-women content on these sites - a dramatic increase from when the account was created.
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Some of this content contained sexual violence, the sharing of disturbing memes about sexual acts, and content condoning rape, harassment, and gender-based violence.
They also invoked extreme ideologies.
This included the "incel" movement - an internet subculture that encourages men to blame women for problems in their own lives.
He has been linked to several acts of violence, including the recent shootings in Plymouth, UK.
"If this was a real person, (Barry) would have been brought into a hate community full of misogynistic content very, very quickly — within two weeks," Koliverova says.
Far from preventing Berry from engaging in anti-women content, Facebook and Instagram seem to have promoted it for him.
In contrast, there was no anti-women content on TikTok and very little on Twitter. YouTube has suggested some videos that are hostile to women.
Facebook, which also owns Instagram, says it is working to discourage content that violates its rules and is improving its technology "to find and remove abuse more quickly."
YouTube says it has "strict policies" on hate and "quickly" removes content that violates its rules.
That wasn't the only thing about the experiment that struck me.
Barry's main interest was originally conspiracy theories, and I expected him to be inundated with such content at first. But he wasn't.
Social networking sites are under increasing pressure not to promote misleading information about vaccines and the pandemic.
But why hasn't this happened with misogynistic content on Facebook and Instagram?
"They raise their bottom line by keeping people interested in horrific, violent, often misogynistic content," Koliverva says.
Almost three billion people around the world use Facebook - and last year this network earned an average of 32 dollars (about 3.300 dinars) in advertising revenue per user.
The longer people stay on the platform, the more ads it sells and the more money the tech giant makes.
Facebook says that "protecting" the community "is more important than maximizing profits".
He announced new measures to combat sexualized hatred directed at journalists, politicians and celebrities on his websites.
Love Island: Women "disproportionately targeted"
For Panorama, researchers from the Demos organization analyzed abusive messages sent to female reality show contestants Island of love (ITV) and Married at first sight (Channel 4).
They found that female reality TV contestants are disproportionately targeted by abuse on social media, which is often rooted in misogyny and combined with racism.
While the contestants received mostly positive messages, fashion blogger Kaz Kamvi (26) and twenty-three-year-old medical student Priya Gopaldas told Panorama that they also received some disturbing hateful messages.
"The most difficult thing to deal with is abuse that is racially motivated. When you look at me, I'm a dark-skinned black woman, that's the first thing you see," says Kaz.
"And the fact that my family was exposed to that breaks my heart."
Ellen Judson, who led research for Demos and focused on the politics of social media, says reality TV is a great place to start analyzing online hate viewing because the genre is so popular with people expressing who they like or dislike.
"Also, we see that the contestants are a relatively equal mix of men and women - and from many different backgrounds - so that gives us an opportunity to analyze the differences in how the public reacts to them."
Demos looked at more than 90.000 online messages about Love Island and Married at First Sight contestants:
- On Twitter, 26 percent of posts about women were offensive compared to 14 percent of those directed at men.
- Abuse directed at women is primarily gendered (much more so than men), with messages full of gendered clichés and stories of sexual acts.
- The hatred intensified in combination with racist language directed at black and Asian contestants.
"People used explicitly gendered slurs - women are manipulative, sneaky, sexual, women are mean or stupid.
Whereas what we saw with men was that they were attacked because apparently they weren't masculine enough - because they were too weak," says Judson.
"Also, we're seeing black women being targeted for more devastating racially-based attacks."
I wanted to see what impact this type of abuse had, so I spoke to politicians and doctors who use social media to do their jobs.
Like me, they don't mind being criticized, but they do when it gets personal.
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Ruth Davidson, the former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, fears online abuse aimed at women could turn back the clock when it comes to offline equality.
"The attacks that came directly at me were about my politics, some about my physical appearance, many about the fact that I'm gay and many about the fact that I'm a woman with an opinion."
There are also concerns that online abuse could lead to harm in the real world.
"You look at your phone and read a message from someone telling you as an NHS doctor they want to rape you until you need one of your ventilators," explains Dr Rachel Clarke, a doctor based in Oxford.
She treated patients with covid during the pandemic and sees the use of social networks as an extension of her duties as a doctor.
This means that she often posted warnings about the impact of the corona virus - and encouraged followers to get vaccinated.
Those tweets in particular often provoked a wave of misogynistic anti-vaccination hate, not unlike the accounts that send me hate messages.
"Men I know are also subjected to online abuse.
"But the scale of the abuse is much smaller. If you're a doctor, it's going to be a lot more instinctive and target you as a woman."
Violence off the Internet
I participated in a large-scale research by UNESCO - the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization - which deals with the impact of hate on the Internet.
Lead researcher Julie Pozetti and her team asked more than 800 women, journalists like me, about their experiences of online hate.
Then they studied some of the reports, including mine and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa's.
She is an investigative journalist from the Philippines who is often abused online and says she wears body armor because she is afraid of being attacked.
"Violence on the Internet is really a new field of conflict that women face internationally," explains Pozetti.
Twenty percent of women who responded to a UN survey, in collaboration with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), said they had already experienced real-life attacks, including stalking and physical assault.
I'm particularly concerned about the hate I'm getting online, including a man who appears to have a previous conviction for stalking women.
The response from the police completely frustrated me.
After the wave of abuse at the end of April this year, I reported the most serious threats, such as those of sexual violence, to the police.
It is a criminal offense to send messages on the Internet that are offensive or obscene because they cause distress.
The police officer initially contacted me and I shared my evidence of the abuse - but she didn't get back to me until weeks later when she told me she was switching teams, that my case had been forwarded and there had been no progress.
The new liaison officer did not contact me until July - when it became clear that the evidence I had initially shared with the police had been lost, something they later admitted.
I tried to report another series of rape threats, death threats and abusive messages in late July to a new officer.
When we met in person in mid-August, the officer admitted that he was not the right person to handle the case - and that it should have been referred to a specialist team.
More delays - and although the seriousness of the messages was acknowledged, there was little support for the victim.
At the end of August I was with my third liaison officer - who asked me to go through the portfolio of evidence I had already sent and to mark which messages were from Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as he was not sure how to use the platforms.
My last liaison officer has requested more information from social networking sites - but no progress yet.
According to the data of several police services, obtained by Panorama through a request for free access to information, in the past five years the number of people reporting abuse on the Internet has more than doubled.
But in the same period, the number of arrests increased by only 32 percent.
The victims are mostly women.
This comes amid growing pressure, particularly to do more to tackle violence against women on our streets following the murders of Sarah Everard and Sabine Nese.
I expressed my concern that people abusing me might turn up at my job - but I was only told to call the police number 999 if I felt I was in danger.
The police say they take online hate very seriously and that my case is under active investigation.
The National Police Chiefs' Council says the police take all reports of malicious communications seriously and will investigate them, but must work on a priority basis due to limited resources.
The council says it can take other actions, not just arrest.
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Solutions?
Draft United Nations proposals to force social media companies to better protect women have been provided exclusively to Panorama.
They call on social media platforms to introduce flags for accounts that have previously posted misogynistic abuse.
It also wants more moderators to make decisions about offensive material - and an early warning system for users if they think online abuse could cause real-world harm.
"We would like platforms to treat gender-based online violence at least as seriously as they treated misinformation during the pandemic," explains Julie Pozetti, who led the research that triggered the recommendations.
"I think we have to challenge them," says Ruth Davidson.
"I don't think it's in anyone's interest for women, who are consistently abused in a way that a man would never be, to allow other young women who are online and watching that abuse to think that's just the way things are."
For women of all ages - myself included - this means refusing to be driven off social media by abuse.
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