Online attacks can pose a great psychological burden on journalists and affect their ability to work without fear of retaliation and their credibility within society. However, many of these attacks fall within the bounds of protected speech according to international law. Criminal justice is appropriate for addressing only some of them, especially direct threats of violence and repeated harassment that rises to the level of stalking. Insult, especially when the journalist is a public figure, is generally a form of protected speech, while defamatory accusations of fact should be addressed in civil court.
conversations between social media platforms and newsrooms are ongoing in order to identify remedies that would limit attacks against journalists on social media without impacting free speech.
While stating that “Twitter’s number one priority is improving the health of the public conversation, and safety is a key part of this goal”, a Twitter representative told IPI that there was still much work to be done. “We will continue to have open, honest conversations with stakeholders across the world to ensure we are constantly learning about emergent malicious behaviours, and that our products and policies are sufficiently updated.”
In a similar vein, Facebook also explained to IPI that it had undertaken several changes to tackle this issue. “We know that journalists, especially women, are a particular target for online trolls and bullies. We take this very seriously and are committed to helping journalists stay safe on our platform. With that in mind, we have been engaging proactively on this topic with news organizations, independent journalists, and local and global experts for many years now to understand how our tools and policies could be improved”.
In acknowledgment of the fact that the complex issue of attacks against journalists can only be partially tackled through legal measures and cooperation with the platforms, news organizations have increasingly sought to develop effective internal strategies for addressing the problem.
The development of newsroom strategies related to the moderation of online conversations is in its early stage and no tested formula exists. The newsrooms visited or contacted as part of this study have adopted different approaches, guided primarily by the resources available and, secondly, by the relevance given to the development of a relationship of trust with the community of users. News organizations that value the creation of an active online community of readers are likely to invest more in the moderation of online conversations, with the goal of countering attacks against journalists and generating community support for them.
In this context, understanding the identity of online aggressors is important not only for the targeted journalists but also for moderators of online discussions, who aim to ensure that online discussions reflect the diversity of opinions that exist in society. “I believe in dialogue” is the premise that many social media and community managers put forward in interviews for this study. They said they used this principle in deciding what content should be removed, blocked or silenced from online conversations (depending on what the platform in question allows) and what could and should be confronted and debated as a reflection of sentiments that exist in the societies they cover. Communities managers also said they hoped such engagement would lead the one or the other user to understand that criticism and corrections are welcome, but insults and threats are not acceptable.
Sadly, newsrooms, while they acknowledge the highly problematic consequences of online harassment on their journalists, do not have sufficient resources to dedicate to a proper strategy of prevention and protection. This is the case, for example, for the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland, one of the leading independent voices in the country and the target of constant and highly sustained waves of harassment against its journalists. Gazeta Wyborcza, which employs skilled community and social media moderators, said that the number of hateful messages it receives is such that, on one occasion, it even felt compelled to close comments under articles on refugees. “It wasn’t a discussion, it was a sea of hate that we couldn’t control”, the newspaper’s social media editor explained. Still, even the extreme measure of closing comments does not prevent the dissemination of attacks on social media platforms.
Some of the interviewed journalists also reported that they took the decision not to be present on some social media platforms in order to try to limit the sheer number of hateful postings they receive. This measure, too, is considered by most journalists to be extreme and hardly viable in today’s journalism reality, where social media platforms are not only a place where journalists gather information but also a key means of dissemination of ideas and information.
In small- and medium-sized newsrooms that are not able to employ full-time community managers and moderators for the comment sections, it is common for editors and journalists themselves to take time to review user comments and moderate discussions. Often, this task ends up being carried out outside of working hours or during supposed breaks. The psychological toll resulting from reading a large number of hateful comments either directed at the person herself or her colleagues is often underestimated.
Our research showed that not only is the development of strategies to counter online harassment at an early stage but so, too, is the development of a newsroom culture necessary to tackle the issue in a holistic and coordinated fashion. We found that while an increasing number of hateful and abusive messages directed at journalists, as well as vicious attacks on female journalists specifically, are an indisputable reality for all those who contributed to this study, limited knowledge of countermeasures, the overall novelty of the phenomenon itself, and often limited appreciation of the gender-based nature of the attacks, lead to a degree of apathy, indifference and/or helplessness on the part of some journalists and newsroom managers.
Some journalists with whom we spoke said they did not, or would not, report abusive posts against them to their superior. On the one hand, these journalists feared that doing so might reflect negatively on their performance assessment and professional reputation; on the other hand, some expressed a lack of trust that they would receive adequate support from their supervisors. Indeed, some journalists who had reported abusive messages to managers said they had received no response whatsoever.