Female journalists in my home country of South Africa—and elsewhere, for that matter—often face a lot of misogynistic abuse online. So the human rights group Global Witness set out to see what the big social platforms were doing about it.
In collaboration with South Africa’s Legal Resources Centre (LRC), a public interest law firm, Global Witness concocted 10 ads brimming with misogynistic hate speech targeted at women journalists, and submitted each in four languages—English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, and Zulu—to Facebook, TikTok, X, and YouTube. You will probably not be shocked to learn what happened next.
