Changes to content moderation on Facebook and Instagram are likely to mean further harm for women.
When big companies make announcements, they tend to do their best to make it sound like everything will be fine—better, even!—with the changes they’re planning. The reality for ordinary people is often quite different.
Other than in George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984,that reality has never been more evident than in Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that Meta companies Facebook, Instagram and Threads are ending their relationship with outside fact-checkers. The new model, he said, will allow members of the social media community to add notes about a post’s authenticity and reliability.
Replacing professional fact-checking with comments from other users? What could possibly go wrong?
Any woman who’s used social media knows how toxic the content and comments can be. Where Meta insists its previous system meant too much content being censored, users with a conscience can’t help but wonder how much worse the misogyny can get. We’re about to find out.
More than half of women in a United Nations poll disagreed with the statement “the internet is a safe place to express my opinions.” In a 2019 Statistics Canada poll, one in five Canadian women reported experiencing online harassment, a figure that rises to one-third of women between 15 and 24.
We encounter abuse all the time on our own social media, and it’s hard to see that improving under the new system. Individual women and girls are bracing for even more crude, hateful comments, possibly backed up by gang-mentality “community notes,” with members of the LGBTQ2S+ community likely to be targeted even more severely. From nasty comments about appearances or actual threats of assault and murder, nothing would surprise us.
Commenters are free to promote untrue material including personal attacks, harassers are free to torment women and girls. It’s not clear that even abusive material such as revenge postings of intimate videos would be taken down.
We need to be where women can find us.
Why, then, does Women’s Resources maintain a presence on these social media? (We stopped posting on X in 2024 for many of the same reasons.) It’s simple: We need to be where women can find us.
You can help by supporting the women in your life online, and sharing our social media posts to ensure as many women and girls as possible are aware of how we can help. If you use any social media, please be aware of the kinds of reactions you’re getting and how they affect your own mental health. If you have younger women and girls in your life, check in with them about the same things.
Nobody has to accept online misogyny, even if the powers that be are creating the conditions for it to flourish.
By Nancy Payne
