Make reporting online misogyny easier, says Ofcom

Head of regulator tells social media firms to shape up after finding three in five women victimised

SOCIAL media firms must make it easier to report misogyny, Ofcom has recommended, after its research found that 60 per cent of women suffered harmful behaviour including harassment and trolling.

Dame Melanie Dawes, the watchdog’s chief executive, said the “shocking” abuse was getting worse while at the same time it had lost confidence in the ability of social media firms to remove the abuse when they complained. “People don’t feel that when they report something there’ll be any action,” Dame Melanie said.

She promised that Ofcom would be “straight into the companies and asking for information” once it was formally empowered as the regulator by the Government’s new online safety laws.

She said her priority was to ensure there were effective ways for people to report abuse. It is understood this will include enabling “bystanders” to report abuse rather than leaving it up to the victim to get it taken down.

The research, based on 6,000 people, found that although men had experienced harmful behaviour online (64 per cent) in the past four weeks, women were more likely to be distressed by it, at 43 per cent versus 33 per cent of men. Women found hateful, offensive or discriminatory content particularly concerning compared with men (85 per cent versus 70 per cent), as well as trolling (60 per cent versus 25 per cent).

Dame Melanie said social media firms needed to crack down on “illegal” content such as revenge porn, harassment and stalking. “We will say: ‘Talk to the women on your services, understand who’s on your services and who actually is experiencing a problem. Find out what they think about the tools to report and show them you’re acting when something is going wrong because at the moment, there isn’t the confidence there,’” she said.

Another target will be the social media firms’ algorithms, which she blamed for being behind the worst online harms because they were designed to boost revenues, profits and advertising rather than to protect users.

“Some of the worst harms are caused when things get shared with thousands of other people. That’s when trolling and pile-ons really occur,” she said.

“Algorithms are too often designed around the business and not the user. They are built around engagement. That’s the business model. That’s what drives advertising revenue. They are built to amplify engagement but that also means they often amplify harm. So that’s the third thing that we think the platform’s need to be looking into.”

She wanted social media firms to ensure they were safe in advance. “New products, whether it’s the metaverse or new services are trialled on the public often on young people as well sometimes on children,” she said.