Fifty-Eight Percent, Driven Offline

A 2020 survey of some 14,000 girls and young women across 22 countries found that 58 percent had faced harassment or abuse online. For many, the researchers said, the abuse pushed them off Facebook, Instagram and Twitter altogether.

In October 2020, the girls' rights organization Plan International published what it described as its largest ever global survey of young women's experiences online. Researchers polled 14,071 girls and young women aged 15 to 25 across 22 countries, from Brazil and Nigeria to Spain, Thailand and the United States. More than half — 58 percent — said they had been harassed or abused on social media, according to the report.

The abuse was not confined to any one platform. Attacks were most common on Facebook, where 39 percent of those surveyed said they had been harassed, followed by Instagram at 23 percent, WhatsApp at 14 percent, Snapchat at 10 percent, Twitter at 9 percent and TikTok at 6 percent, the survey found. The most frequently reported forms included abusive and insulting language, deliberate embarrassment, body-shaming and threats of sexual violence.

Silenced, then gone

The consequences reached beyond the screen. One in five girls surveyed — 19 percent — said they had left or significantly reduced their use of a social media platform after being targeted, while another one in ten said they had changed the way they expressed themselves online, according to a Thomson Reuters Foundation report on the findings.

“Girls are being silenced by a toxic level of harassment,” Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen, then chief executive of Plan International, said in a statement accompanying the survey. “Driving girls out of online spaces is hugely disempowering in an increasingly digital world, and damages their ability to be seen, heard and become leaders,” she added, in remarks reported by Al Jazeera.

A ‘new frontier’

Plan International characterized social media as a new frontier for gender-based violence, arguing that the online harassment its survey documented was an extension of the abuse and discrimination girls face offline. The organization said the attacks were worse for girls who were politically outspoken, or who were disabled, Black or identified as LGBTIQ+, and that some respondents reported harassment beginning when they were as young as eight, according to the report.

The survey, carried out for Plan International by the research firms Kantar and Ipsos between April and May 2020, called on social media companies to strengthen their reporting tools and protections. Nearly half of those harassed, the organization said, wanted the platforms to do more to keep them safe.