Africa-Press – Eritrea. A study by the digital rights group Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has unveiled that Meta’s Instagram fails to protect high-profile women on its platform.
The study looked into five women with over one million followers on the social media platform, reviewing the types of Direct Messages they receive.
“One in every 15 of the messages ranged from misogynistic abuse, graphic sexual pictures and threats of violence,” the study found.
Although the messages were directly reported to the platform’s moderator, nine out of 10 times, the reports were not acted upon.
CCDH CEO and Founder Imran Ahmed said in an Interview with NBC-CO TV that this was a tool meant to remove women from such powerful positions.
“It is about power. It’s about the power to cleanse spaces of people you don’t want there so as to have dominance,” he said.
This is not the first time the social media giant Meta is under fire for ignoring the general well-being of users.
In October 2021, former Meta employee Frances Haugen blew the whistle on Facebook’s algorithm that propels the spread of misinformation instead of stopping it.
Haugen revealed that misinformation gets the most engagement on social media and Facebook’s algorithm makes sure it spreads so people spend more time on their platform.
The whistle-blower revealed to The Wall Street Journal that Facebook’s algorithm overlooks reports by teenagers who report the effects of harmful content they encounter on the platform.
Girls would report feeling bad about their bodies after seeing other people on the platform with what they considered to be the perfect bodies and Facebook chose to ignore those reports.
As the August polls near, one of the biggest threats to women in the political scene is online violence.
Siasa Place CEO Nerima Wako said in an engagement last year that Such threats on social media end up pushing women out of the digital space as well as the political scene.
CCDH CEO and Founder Imran Ahmed have asked Meta to do more to protect people from what they call Hidden Hate online since Direct Messages are private to users only.
“They are compounding the harm done to those women because at that moment, you’re telling them that if you hold out your hand for help, we will reach back out and take it. What they are doing is actually gaslighting those women,” he said.
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