At the UN Generation Equality Forum in Paris on Thursday Twitter, TikTok, Google, and Facebook committed to tackling online abuse and improving safety for women on their platforms. The pledge came following consultations with the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF) over the past year, aimed at examining online gender-based violence and abuse.<\/p>\n
The WWWF said the consultations showed women want more control over who could reply or comment on their social media posts and more choice around what they see online, where, and when. <\/p>\n
According to the WWWF, the companies have pledged to \u201cbuild better ways for women to curate their safety online\u201d by offering more granular settings, such as who can see, share, or comment on posts; more simple and accessible language; easier navigation and access to safety tools, and by \u201creducing the burden on women by proactively reducing the amount of abuse they see.\u201d <\/p>\n
The way that last part is worded is a bit frustrating; it addresses the aftermath or the location of abuse, but not the person \/ people committing<\/em> the abuse. And just because the women aren\u2019t seeing<\/em> the abuse on social media, doesn\u2019t mean the abuse has gone away. The platforms certainly bear some responsibility to make their online spaces safer, but until they get more proactive and less reactive, and go after the abusers, the onus will continue to fall on women and marginalized groups to report abuse and convince a social media platform that it\u2019s worthwhile for them to address. <\/p>\n In addition to the \u201cbetter curation\u201d checklist, as part of the pledge, the companies will put in place improvements to their reporting systems by offering users the ability to track and manage their reports, and establish additional ways for women to get help and support when they report abuse. They\u2019ll also enable \u201cgreater capacity to address context and\/or language,\u201d which may allow for more subtle forms of verbal abuse or threats to be incorporated into enforcement measures. <\/p>\n These all sound like excellent goals, but the release from the WWWF didn\u2019t include any specifics about how each platform plans to achieve them. Nor did the companies themselves offer any comment as part of the news release, so we\u2019ve reached out to all four for comment. Vijaya Gadde, head of legal, public policy, and trust & safety at Twitter said in an emailed statement that keeping everyone who uses Twitter safe and free from abuse is its top priority. <\/p>\n \u201cWhile we have made recent strides in giving people greater control to manage their safety, we know there is still much work to be done,\u201d Gadde wrote, noting that women and underrepresented communities are disproportionately affected by abuse (which is pretty well known at this point). Gadde said abusive behavior \u201chas no place on our service. It hurts those who are targeted and is detrimental to the health of the conversation and the role Twitter plays in the expression and exchange of ideas where people \u2014 no matter their views or perspectives \u2014 can be heard.\u201d<\/p>\n Facebook\u2019s global head of safety Antigone Davis said in an email that the company was looking forward to working with other tech companies to make the internet safer for women. \u201cTo keep women safe from abuse, exploitation, and harassment online and offline, we regularly update our policies, tools, and technology in consultation with experts around the world\u2014including with over 200 women\u2019s safety organizations,\u201d Davis said in the statement. <\/p>\n Tara Wadhwa, director of policy for TikTok US, wrote a blog post outlining the company\u2019s plans. \u201cOver the coming months, we\u2019ll begin to develop and test a number of potential product changes to our platform that address these priorities and help make TikTok an ever safer place for women,\u201d Wadhwa wrote. <\/p>\n Google didn\u2019t immediately reply to a request for comment Thursday. <\/p>\n At this point, there doesn\u2019t appear to be anything binding the companies to these \u201ccommitments\u201d other than the prospect of public shaming if they fail to deliver. And unfortunately, that tends to be the best way to get social media platforms to respond to users\u2019 problems. <\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At the UN Generation Equality Forum in Paris on Thursday Twitter, TikTok, Google, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1549,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[38,64,62,66,63,65,69,67,71,68,70],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The pledge includes the platforms improving their systems to report abuse<\/q><\/aside>\n