New recommendations for newsrooms to tackle online violence against women journalists
New research highlights the failure of news organizations and big tech companies to address online violence against women journalists. Recommendations aim to protect journalists facing death threats, sexual violence threats, and coordinated harassment. The study is based on experiences of nearly 1,000 women journalists worldwide and includes country and big data case studies. These findings are part of the upcoming book “The Chilling: A Global Study of Online Violence Against Women Journalists.
New research from a UN study produced by ICFJ details how news organizations and big tech companies fail to adequately mitigate and respond to online violence targeting women journalists – a global scourge with serious and far-reaching consequences.
The researchers offer concrete recommendations to safeguard better women journalists, who face credible death threats, threats of sexual violence – including against their children – and large-scale coordinated online harassment designed to silence them and their reporting.
The two new papers published for World Press Freedom Day have extracted chapters from the forthcoming book “The Chilling: A Global Study of Online Violence Against Women Journalists.” The latest findings are based on the experiences of nearly 1,000 women journalists and experts from around the world who were surveyed and interviewed over the past two and a half years.
An international team of researchers also produced 15 country case studies and two big data case studies focused on prominent journalists for the project, which informed the papers were also published alongside.