Twitter ‘failing women’ by leaving vicious abuse online
‘Vile racist, misogynist and threatening abuse gets reported to them, but they are too slow to act’
TWITTER is “failing women” who are victims of online threats and abuse by taking too long to remove hateful and misogynistic content, Britain’s leading women’s rights charity warns today.
The Fawcett Society says sexist, obscene and anti-semitic abuse directed against high-profile figures, including MPS, was still on the site more than a week after it had been reported.
Prosecutors are facing demands for online hate crimes against women to be given equal status as face-to-face abuse in the same way that racist, religious and homophobic online hate crimes were yesterday recategorised.
The Fawcett Society will today publish a joint report with the campaign group Reclaim The Internet in which they say Twitter is doing “too little, too slowly” to combat online threats to women. The two groups identified 14 cases of threats and abuse against women, including the MPS Luciana Berger, Diane Abbott and the late Jo Cox, as well as the campaigner Gina Miller, and reported them to Twitter earlier this month.
The tweets included threats of rape as well as images and video of apparently non-consensual sexual acts alongside abuse aimed at migrants and Muslims. Last night five of the 14 accounts remained active with the tweets still on the site, while Twitter had taken up to nine days to suspend the others.
Yvette Cooper MP, founder of Reclaim The Internet, said: “Twitter claims to stop hate speech but they just don’t do it in practice. Vile racist, misogynist and threatening abuse gets reported to them, but they are too slow to act so they just keep giving a platform to hatred and extremism.”
A spokesman for Twitter said: “Abuse and harassment have no place on Twitter. We’ve introduced a range of new tools and features to improve our platform for everyone, and we’re now taking action on ten times the number of abusive accounts every day than the same time in 2016.”