Celebrity women including Rachel Riley and Amber Heard have opened up their DMs to show how Instagram is not doing enough to protect women in the public eye from misogynistic abuse online. A study by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which included input from several women in the public eye such as actor Amber Heard and broadcaster Rachel Riley, suggests that Instagram was failing to remove accounts that sent abuse to women, in violation of the site’s rules.
The report saw five prominent women give access to their direct messages (DMs) on Instagram to the online safety group, which claimed that it had found an “epidemic of misogynist abuse” that was being “ignored” by the platform as 90% of the offending accounts remained active after sending abusive content and being reported.
As well as Ms Heard and Ms Riley, Jamie Klingler, co-founder of Reclaim These Streets; journalist and mental health campaigner Bryony Gordon and Sharan Dhaliwal, founder of UK South Asian culture magazine Burnt Roti, took part in the study. It said that threats of violence and abuse were being sent to women in voice notes as well as in text form and as images, with the CCDH suggesting that Instagram’s safety features were ineffective at blocking out such content.
