An update on our commitment to end online violence against women
Last year, we shared our commitment to pursue technology initiatives to thwart online violence against women. Online violence against women is a global issue that impacts not just the individuals who experience it, but our societies and democracies at large. Today we are excited to share several updates on our progress in this space.
When we completed our global study of online violence against women with The Economist Institute in early 2021, we found that a majority of women online (85%) have seen online violence firsthand. Nearly 40% had experienced it personally. Over the past year we have spoken with many women, advocates and organizations on the frontlines of the fight against online violence and focused our work on the individuals and groups most often impacted, to hear firsthand what tools and services would best serve their needs.
Earlier this month we released the open sourced code for Harassment Manager, a new tool that allows users to document and manage online abuse targeted at them on social media. This technology leverages Jigsaw’s long-standing investment in user experience research and machine learning to help detect toxicity in online comments and measurably reduce toxicity across online platforms. We partnered with several human rights NGOs, tech companies, high-profile journalists and activists to create a tool for those most at risk of being harassed on social media. Harassment Manager builds on these deep cross-industry collaborations, including with Twitter (the platform our code was built on for launch) and The Thomson Reuters Foundation, a leading defender of press freedom who will be the first partner to bring Harassment Manager to their global community of journalists this spring. We’re looking forward to seeing more organizations use the Harassment Manager technology to support their communities. Organizations interested in the tool can learn more on GitHub.
We have also seen great engagement with our Women’s Online Digital Safety Program (in partnership with Google’s Women Techmakers), which in 2021 alone brought together more than 2,000 participants from 50+ countries around the world. The program provides trainings for women working in tech, led by technology experts and developers, and includes other free tools that can help manage harassment, like Jigsaw’s Perspective API and Google’s Advanced Protection Program.
Given the interest in this program, we launched an online version of the training earlier this month on the Google Developers website to support a broader audience around the world.
The program also includes hackathons where participants work together to develop innovative solutions to their online safety challenges — with over 100 concepts created so far.
Building off of this work, we collaborated with The Kenya Women Parliamentary Association (KEWOPA) to set up trainings for women legislators in Kenya in advance of the country’s August elections, including sessions on online safety and how to manage their presence on social media.
Our research and development teams have been exploring other areas of harassment online. Earlier this year, we open-sourced machine learning models developed in partnership with NYU that can help identify calls to harassment online, including doxing, or sharing personal information about someone online, a tactic that is disproportionately used to silence and intimidate women online.
We also continue to investigate ways to use and refine machine learning models to help identify toxicity online. A big part of this is our ongoing support and evolution of our toxicity detection tool Perspective API. This year alone we have released models that support 10 new languages and our engineers continue to update Perspective to make it more reliable for moderators and their online communities. We also coauthored an accepted proposal for a 2021 SemEval competition investigating misogyny in meme content with researchers from Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca and Universitat Politècnica de València.
Our continued support of efforts from other organizations this year included work from PEN America, OnlineSOS, Right To Be (formerly Hollaback!) and the Cyber Civil Rights Institute (CCRI) to combat online violence against women.
We create these technology initiatives to provide helpful resources for women who are facing harassment online, especially journalists, activists, politicians and other public figures who are most often the subject of online attacks. We hope they will inspire other stakeholders to take action on this important issue as we continue to work closely with leaders of technology, human rights and civil society to support women’s rights around the world.
By Patricia Georgiou, Director of Partnerships and Business Development, Jigsaw
