On 21 July, Take Back the Tech! began a campaign demanding to know what Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are doing about violence against women on their sites. Our primary goal is to get them to take a clear stand on violence against women in their terms of service and engage with diverse civil society to find solutions for safer platforms
Women use social networking sites more often than men, but these sites have failed to fully respond to the concerns of their women users. In more than 4,000 cases of cyberstalking reported to Halt Online Abuse since 2000, 70% of victims were female. Presently, 82% of social media violence against women reported on Take Back the Tech!‘s map happened on one of the big three sites – Facebook, Twitter or YouTube – with Facebook alone accountable for half.
APC commissioned research that reveals that these companies fail women users, especially those outside of North America and Europe, and that they need to be more transparent: we don’t know who responds to reports and how they are trained, and we haven’t seen data on reporting demographics and success.
Read the full article in GenderIT.org .