Session
Organizer 1: Mariana Valente, InternetLab
Organizer 2: Nandini Chami, IT for Change and part of Digital Justice project, a collaborative initiative of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) network and IT for Change
Organizer 3: Scott Campbell, UN Human Rights
Speaker 1: Mariana Valente, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 2: Nanjira Sambuli, Civil Society, African Group
Speaker 3: Jai Vipra, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 4: Christophe Speckbacher, Programme Manager, Gender Equality Division, DG II – Democracy, Council of Europe
Speaker 5: Gisela Perez de Acham, Human Rights Center / UC Berkeley
Scott Campbell, Intergovernmental Organization, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Nandini Chami, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Mariana Valente, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Round Table - U-shape - 90 Min
An effective online content governance framework that balances freedom of expression and freedom from misogynistic speech continues to be a policy challenge for gender inclusion. The attacks that women face in the online public sphere reflects social prejudice that is deeply based on context, and intersectional. For instance, in India and Brazil, caste and race are ever-present in the hate that women encounter online.
In this panel, we will present for the first time first the preliminary results of a research being developed in parnership by InternetLab (Brazil) and IT for Change (India), in which legal frameworks and court rulings in both countries are being analyzed; the results so far provide insights into the normalization of misogynous speech and issues around access to justice. Expert panelists from the African and European regions will also provide insights into the following policy questions:
1. Local-level legislation and policies: What is the character of the current legal vacuum, and which are possible solutions for enhancing women's protection against hate speech online, at the local level?
2. Solutions at the platform level / policies directed to platforms: what have been the outcomes of national or regional initiatives directed to platforms to curb hate speech, such as the NetzDG or the EU Code of Conduct? How to evaluate those policies in comparison with private regulation developed by platforms themselves, or new developments such as Facebook's External Oversight Board?
3. Algorithms: how effective have been algorithms to detect and help combat online sexism?
GOAL 5: Gender Equality
The agenda for this session, organized as a roundtable, is as follows:
(a) Deep dive into context-specific manifestations of online sexism and misogyny and identifying the key legal-institutional and socio-cultural challenges of the issue, based on empirical research being developed in Brazil and India, and observations from the African and European regions;
(b) Exchange of ideas and evaluation of legal, policy and community action directed to intermediaries or by platforms themselves.
After the presentations from panelists, we will conduct half an hour of discussion including present and remote participants.
We expect to be able to come up with insightful inputs on how to regulate at the local level and all its diversity, and also to evaluate recent trends in platform regulation, thinking beyond national boundaries.
The format of the session makes for engaged debate and dialogue -- a roundtable that is kickstarted with trigger presentations to catalyse reflective engagement. 30 minutes have been earmarked for plenary discussion to ensure that participants have adequate time for interventions.
Relevance to Theme: A central concern of the thematic area “Security, Safety, Stability and Resilience” is the creation of a healthy digital environment that enables women to freely exercise their voice, without the shadow of violence perpetually looming over them.
Relevance to Internet Governance: Content regulation has been a long-standing priority area of engagement for the Dynamic Coalition on Gender and Internet Governance and this has acquired a lot of traction in the past couple of years. Feminist activists and groups across the global South have been calling out the increasing sexism and misogyny in dominant online spaces and the inadequacy of existing responses of states and platform intermediaries. The Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women (part of the Special Procedures Mechanism of the UN OHCHR) has called attention to the need for immediate cooperation of states, platform intermediaries and all other stakeholders in this regard, in order to evolve a robust response to the issue that is rooted in the broader framework of human rights. Sexism and misogyny have tended to be historically ignored in legal discourse. Democracies have tended to tolerate disparaging remarks about women in the public sphere. However, as women have stormed the Internet, seizing online spaces to speak up, build community and assert their rights, this normalization has become contested. Further, what existing research points to is that in the online public sphere, hate against women is based on their differential locations – tying in with their caste, racial, religious, ethnic and sexual identities. While social media platforms acknowledge the challenge and are exploring new ways of modifying techno-design and upgrading community standards in context-appropriate ways, efforts need to be based on informed discussions rooted in feminist frameworks. Legal approaches need a new normal. Civil society organizations, especially women’s rights activists working on building alternative communicative cultures for the digital society, need to present ideas and concepts that can inform norm development by the state and by social media companies. This workshop will bring initial insights from an inter-country research project exploring legal/institutional/socio-cultural responses to tackle online hate speech against women in Brazil and India, in order to trigger an informed debate and discussion in this emerging policy area.
The online moderator will invite comments/reflections on the trigger presentation from remote participants which she will feed into the plenary discussion.
Report
1. Local-level legislation and policies: What is the character of the current legal vacuum, and which are possible solutions for enhancing women's protection against hate speech online, at the local level?
2. Solutions at the platform level / policies directed to platforms: what have been the outcomes of national or regional initiatives directed to platforms to curb hate speech, such as the NetzDG or the EU Code of Conduct? How to evaluate those policies in comparison with private regulation developed by platforms themselves, or new developments such as Facebook's External Oversight Board?
3. Algorithmic filtering: Is preemptive filtering an effective tool to tackle gender-based hate speech online? Or is overcensorship an inevitable outcome? What does experience suggest?
An effective online content governance framework that balances freedom of expression and freedom from misogynistic speech continues to be a
policy challenge for gender inclusion. This workshop aimed to bring initial insights from an inter-country research project exploring legal/institutional/socio-cultural responses to tackle online hate speech against women in Brazil and India, in order to trigger an informed debate and discussion in this emerging policy area. The session aimed to discuss online sexism with a special focus on gender-based hate speech by speaking to the following three issues:
i) Legal response to address hate speech
ii) internet intermediary policies
iii) role of automated tools to address these issues in online environments.
Audience questions sought perspectives on whether we can have a global definition for such issues and if anything can be done at the international level. Another brought up the trend of young women distancing themselves from feminism as a descriptor as it is deemed to
be "annoying" by their (male) peers. The issues of freedom of speech and expression within the LGBTIQ community were also addressed. The panel
ended with reflecting on how to balance freedom of speech and expression with the right to be free from violence.
The session was organized by two organizations from the Global South working on a joint research about sexist speech, InternetLab (Brazil) and IT for Change (India). This research will evolve in the next 2 years.
Christophe Speckbacher spoke of the recommendation of the committee of ministers of the Council of Europe, the first international instrument that discusses sexist speech. For instance, it recommends the use of gender-neutral language across all official documents. It additionally also has a call to ban sexism in media and advertisement.
3 participants discussed solutions within the national contexts.
Mariana Valente (InternetLab, Brazil) highlighted that naming the act is central to speaking about violence. There is a taxonomy of words used for violence against women and there are clear disadvantages to not having a clear definition to combat sexist speech online, or a definition of "misogyny".
The Indian experience also points to the patchwork of laws that have to be resorted to, in the absence of a sexist hate speech law, and are inadequate to cover the issue. Concerns of legislative additions that will obligate intermediaries to automate filtering may lead to censorship.
Neema Iyer from Pollicy (Uganda) shared insights from the African contexts where countries share a range of copycat laws and that in fact criminalize women instead of protecting them against online violence.
Speckbacher spoke of the importance of including rules against sexist speech in international instruments.
It was a session about sexist violence, so gender was an integral part of it.