Social media giants ‘weighing up single method of reporting abuse’

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google and TikTok have discussed creating a single, unified method of reporting abuse in a bid to reduce the onslaught of gender-based violence on social media, according to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s foundation.

The social media giants have been participating in talks with the Web Foundation, an organisation founded by Sir Tim and Rosemary Leith, in a new project alongside women’s rights groups created to devise new methods of curbing online harassment, starting with abuse against women.

Adrian Lovett, chief executive of the Web Foundation, said that while in the real world “everyone knows to call 999”, different abuse-reporting mechanisms across different platforms makes the process much less clear online, coupled with a lack of user awareness and clarity around how to flag abuse for moderation.

Discussing a unified abuse reporting procedure was one of several new approaches he said he expected social media firms to announce at the Generation Equality Forum in late June, where the Web Foundation will call on them to make some specific commitments about reducing the incidence of gender-based violence online.

85 per cent of women and girls have experienced or witnessed online violence, with younger women disproportionately affected

“We said to Facebook, Twitter and others: ‘Is there a way you can work together to have a much more coherent, perhaps a single way of reporting incidents of abuse online?’,” he told i.

“That could make a big difference in how much harassment is reported and dealt with, and in turn we could see a reduction in the levels of gender-based violence because we know women’s experience online is different to men’s.”

While Mr Lovett said it was too early to say exactly how the companies will react to the discussions, he added that they were “engaged in the dialogue with us and understand the argument”.

Greater use of automated systems to block and prevent abuse before it surfaces are also being explored in the new Tech Policy Design Lab pilot programme, which has “forced” conversation between groups who have experienced online abuse first-hand and people at the heart of the biggest tech firms, he added.

“There are always complications and challenges in how to implement changes, especially with companies that use very complicated algorithms, but we’re saying to them that there has to be a way,” he said.

“The big companies can play a part in establishing the best norms of standards of behaviour, but we all a role to play in that as well. If we’re committed to a web that is open, decentralised and in the hands of millions or billions of people, we have to say that those people have a role in making the web what we want it to be.”

Human rights and women’s groups have long criticised the major social networks’ failure to curb harassment targeted at its female users, including rape and death threats levelled at prominent female journalists and politicians.

More than half of women who have reported harassment on Facebook claim they didn’t receive a response or were told there would be no action as it did not violate community guidelines, a report from feminist campaign group Level Up found in 2019, while Amnesty International claimed women were still on the receiving end of a “deluge of abuse” on Twitter in a report published last year, despite the company’s repeated promises to improve its practices.

It claimed that women using the social media site were faced with persistent abuse, particularly those from ethnic or religious minorities or marginalised castes, who are lesbian, bisexual, transgender or have disabilities, alongside non-binary individuals.

A spokesperson for Twitter told i: “Safety is a top priority for us and we regularly meet safety partners, civil society and industry to discuss and share ideas on how we can tackle emerging issues and improve the health of the conversation on our platform.”

Facebook, YouTube, Google and TikTok have been contacted for comment.

In an open letter to mark the 32nd anniversary of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim and Ms Leith said the brilliant young leaders of tomorrow were being silenced by a toxic internet, outlining their hopes to “develop solutions to some of the hardest tech problems of our times”, including internet access in unconnected countries.

The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), an initiative of the Web Foundation, has calculated that $428bn (£306bn) spread over 10 years could connect the 3.7bn people globally without internet access – for the equivalent of just $116 per person.

Private companies should provide around 75 per cent of the total, Mr Lovett said, pointing out that many of the countries currently lacking internet connectivity are the markets of the future, and that governments will also need to provide their citizens with what is being increasingly seen as a basic need and right.

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