We recently published a report called “The Chilling”, where we analyzed a series of interviews with women journalists and a global survey worldwide. We also did two case studies about the digital violence against Maria Ressa, who was mentioned in the previous panel, and Carole Cadwalladr. We have been seeing a specific trend to develop orchestrated attacks against women journalists worldwide. It goes from hateful speech against these women journalists to more sophisticated attacks in terms of bots or doxing—all those different words that we are now learning from this online environment of violence against journalists in general, but against women journalists in particular.
Here we need to engage the Internet platforms and companies in this conversation for a potential solution to this problem. One particular issue that is very crucial here is to demand more transparency of the Internet platforms and the way in which they deal with these issues, and also relating to the data of violence against journalists, and against women journalists in particular. If we want to produce evidence-based policy—for instance, to protect women journalists in the online environment—we need the evidence. We need the data.
Unfortunately, we are not there yet. Those companies are very much obscure in terms of the way in which they treat this data and do their human rights risk assessments for dealing with these situations. UNESCO reports have underlined, first, how dangerous the online environment is, particularly for women journalists, but also how difficult it is to design evidence-based policy, particularly because we lack transparency among these Internet companies.