Twitter is a toxic space for women and violates their human rights, Amnesty says
Charity publishes damning critique on 12th anniversary of first-ever tweet
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Your support makes all the difference.Twitter has been accused of creating an unsafe environment for women online and violating their human rights.
A new report by Amnesty International, #ToxicTwitter: Violence and Abuse Against Women Online, details what the organisation regards as the social media giant's failure to address misogynistic abuse, threats of violence and trolling.
Its publication coincides with the site's 12th birthday and is intended to highlight Twitter's inconsistent approach to tackling the abuse of women.
Amnesty surveyed 1,100 British women and found that 78 per cent said they did not feel safe expressing an opinion for fear of vitriolic reprisals.
Just 9 per cent of respondents said they believed the site was doing enough to police abusive behaviour.
"For far too long Twitter has been a space where women can too easily be confronted with death or rape threats, and where their genders, ethnicities and sexual orientations are under attack," said Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International UK.
"The trolls are currently winning, because despite repeated promises, Twitter is failing to do enough to stop them. Twitter must take concrete steps to address and prevent violence and abuse against women on its platform, otherwise its claim to be on women’s side is meaningless."
While the site has played a vital role in promoting the cause of #MeToo and #TimesUp since the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal broke last autumn, those movements have provoked an angry backlash in some quarters.
Twitter has said it disagrees with Amnesty's conclusions and pointed to its recent efforts to address a number of problems the site faces - culling political propaganda bots, removing "deepfake" pornographic videos and suspending accounts that disseminate hate speech to make the site a less hostile arena for comment and interaction.
CEO Jack Dorsey issued a series of posts on 1 March stressing the platform's commitment to reforming its act, acknowledging that offence caused on Twitter has “real-world negative consequences”.
"We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns and increasingly divisive echo chambers," Dorsey said.
"We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough."
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