A report published by the International Centre For Journalists (ICFJ), as part of their ‘Story Killers’ project, has shown light on misogynistic, digital disinformation campaigns designed to discredit women journalists and chill their reporting. The report analysed the quantum of hate four popular women journalists from around the world garnered from online trolls and the type of harassment they were subjected to. The journalists included in this study are Rana Ayyub from India, Ghada Ouiess from Lebanon, Maria Ressa from Philippines, and Carole Cadwalladr from the United Kingdom.
Ghada Oueiss is a journalist with Al Jazeera Arabic and was based in Qatar. According to the report, she was targeted in 2011 when she began covering the Arab Spring protests. Since Ghada was a Christian, she was targeted not just for her gender but also her religion. The journalist did not have a social media presence at this point but was still receiving hate mail and death threats from supporters of the Syrian and Bahraini regimes. As the protests escalated and Ghada’s coverage of these events increased, Twitter accounts impersonating her were created and were spreading disinformation.
In 2014, the journalist opened a Facebook and Twitter account but was not very active on either platform. It was in 2017 that an Egyptian TV anchor accused her of having sexual relations with ISIS fighters. This happened at the same time when Al Jazeera was being targeted by social media accounts associated with the Saudi Arabian regime. After the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashogghi in 2018, Ghada began reporting and tweeting about the Saudi involvement in his murder. She got a “thinly veiled death threat” from a verified Twitter account that was allegedly close to the Saudi royal family.
While the online harassment continued, things took a darker turn in 2020 when doctored documents were leaked online claiming Ghada was involved in fraud and corruption. This leak also revealed her brother’s name and location in Lebanon. In the same year, private pictures of Ghada in a jacuzzi were leaked online. A report by Die Zeit, a German newspaper, discovered that Ghada’s mobile phone was hacked and nearly “5,207 files on her cell phone, including photos, videos and more” were stolen. When Ghada filed a complaint with Facebook regarding the disinformation, doctored images and hacking attempts, she received a reply stating that the content “did not breach the platform’s community standards.”
In December 2020, Ghada filed a civil lawsuit in a USA District Court against the Crown Princes of UAE and Saudi Arabia and several others who were involved in targeted abuse against her. But the judge dismissed the case in March 2022 stating that there was no jurisdiction. The ICfj report said, “Oueiss decided not to appeal the decision, believing she had already achieved her goal of shining an international light on the prolific state-sponsored online violence that she experiences.” However, Oueiss had taken a break from her role as the principal presenter at Al Jazeera Arabic and has not returned to her role as of February 2023.
Maria Ressa, a Filipino and American journalist, has been the target of thousands of social media posts attacking her integrity and threatening her. Maria and the news portal she founded, Rappler, have been the target of online attacks since former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte assumed power in 2016. “For her American citizenship. And for her sexuality. Ressa is an emblematic case study in the global scourge of online violence against women journalists, which operates at the intersection of viral disinformation, networked misogyny, platform capture, press freedom erosion, and contemporary populist politics,” the ICFJ report said.
Maria faces as many as nine separate cases for her investigative stories on Duterte’s disinformation campaign and other critical stories, which if convicted, would send her to prison for her entire life. According to the report, the “lightning rods” for the online attacks include Rappler’s investigative journalism against Duterte, her commentaries and reports on the disinformation campaign, her high-profile media appearances and her international awards.
“The authorities vilify her, and President Duterte has helped to amplify online attacks against her. State authorities thus both directly attack Maria, and also create an enabling environment that facilitates and fuels abuse from others. In turn, online abuse emboldens the authorities in their persecution of her,” Caoilfhionn Gallagher QC, the co-lead of Ressa’s international legal team, explained in the report.
Among its 12 key findings, the report states that 60% of the online attacks against Maria were against her credibility and affecting public trust in her work. They also attacked her credibility and conflated her journalism with ‘fake news’, while 40% of the attacks were personal and visceral. “Much of the abuse and threats are fueled by President Duterte’s public statements demonising Ressa and Rappler as criminals,” the report states, adding that there is evidence of the attacks being coordinated or orchestrated — “a hallmark of state-led disinformation campaigns.”
Further, the report found that while she predominantly receives online attacks on Facebook and Twitter, “Facebook has failed dismally to effectively stem the tide of hate against her.” These were outright threats directly targeting her, as opposed to thousands of ‘subtle’ hateful content that refers to text inside an image, or text that doesn’t contain overt abusive terminology. The ICFJ team also identified many hashtags related to undermining Maria’s reputation and professional credibility on Twitter.
“Such campaigns have also spilled offline, increasing the physical threats Ressa is facing,” the report says. There were also substantial clusters of comments threatening Maria with rape and sexual violence. “The design of social media turned ‘wisdom of the crowds’ into a mob. It’s the chaos of a mob. And beyond that, it’s actually pumping hate into the system,” Maria said.
Carole Cadwalladr is an award winning British journalist whose reporting exposed the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016, which led to the collapse of the data analytics company that was closely associated with Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign in 2016. Ever since her investigative report, she has been the target of abuse from the far right-wing and Brexit supporters. But things took a turn for the worse when a BBC presenter named Andrew Neil called her a “mad cat woman” in a now deleted tweet in 2018. Although he deleted the tweet, Neil did not apologise.
Carole being targeted was not limited to the online sphere alone. In 2018, she was stalked by a man with military and cyber espionage background who tried to befriend her and then sent her threatening messages. Apart from that, multiple defamation suits have been filed against her
The report found that 55% of the online abuse directed at Carole was personal, highly gendered, and designed to ridicule, belittle and discredit her. Further, 40% of the abuse was categorised as harassment designed to undermine Cadwalladr’s professional credibility and trust in her journalism.
“According to our analysis, the main themes associated with abuse against Carole Cadwalladr were: democracy; public health and COVID-19; Brexit, Europe and immigration; and foreign affairs. These are also the issues that Cadwalladr most frequently wrote about and commented on during the period in focus,” it said. Many of the attacks against her were gendered, with accounts calling her “insane, hysterical, mad woman and lunatic”.
“Her fightback strategy in the face of sustained online violence has involved countering disinformation through investigative journalism, forming support networks with other women journalists experiencing social media abuse, and launching civil society collaborations designed to hold social media companies and political actors to account. It is a “solutions focus”, the report quoted Carole as saying.