Activists around the globe are calling consideration to harassment they’ve confronted on Meta’s platforms. Greater than 90 p.c of land and environmental defenders surveyed by Global Witness, a nonprofit group that additionally tracks the murders of environmental advocates, reported experiencing some type of on-line abuse or harassment linked to their work. Fb was the most-cited platform, adopted by X, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
World Witness and lots of the activists it surveyed are calling on Meta and its friends to do extra to handle harassment and misinformation on their platforms. Left to fester, they worry that on-line assaults might gas real-world dangers to activists. Round 75 p.c of individuals surveyed stated they believed that on-line abuse they skilled corresponded to offline hurt.
“These stats actually stayed with me. They had been a lot increased than we anticipated them to be,” Ava Lee, marketing campaign technique lead on digital threats at World Witness, tells The Verge. That’s regardless of anticipating a dismal final result primarily based on prior anecdotal accounts. “It has type of lengthy been identified that the expertise of local weather activists and environmental defenders on-line is fairly terrible,” Lee says.
Left to fester, they worry that on-line assaults might gas real-world dangers
World Witness surveyed greater than 200 individuals between November 2024 and March of this yr that it was in a position to attain via the identical networks it faucets when documenting the killings of land and environmental defenders. It discovered Meta-owned platforms to be “probably the most poisonous.” Round 62 p.c of contributors stated they encountered abuse on Fb, 36 p.c on WhatsApp, and 26 p.c on Instagram.
That in all probability displays how in style Meta’s platforms are around the globe. Fb has greater than 3 billion energetic month-to-month customers, greater than a 3rd of the worldwide inhabitants. However Meta additionally abandoned its third-party fact-checking program in January, which critics warned might result in extra hate speech and disinformation. Meta moved to a crowdsourced strategy to content material moderation much like X, the place 37 p.c of survey contributors reported experiencing abuse.
In May, Meta reported a “small enhance within the prevalence of bullying and harassment content material” on Fb in addition to “a small enhance within the prevalence of violent and graphic content material” through the first quarter of 2025.
“That’s kind of the irony as effectively, of them shifting in direction of this type of free speech mannequin, which truly we’re seeing that it’s silencing sure voices,” says Hannah Sharpe, a senior campaigner at World Witness.
Fatrisia Ain leads an area collective of ladies in Sulawesi, Indonesia, the place she says palm oil firms have seized farmers’ lands and contaminated a river native villagers used to have the ability to depend on for consuming water. Posts on Fb have accused her of being a communist, a harmful allegation in her nation, she tells The Verge.
The follow of “red-tagging” — labeling any dissident voices as communists — has been used to focus on and criminalize activists in Southeast Asia. In a single high-profile case, a outstanding environmental activist in Indonesia was jailed beneath “anti-communism” laws after opposing a brand new gold mine.
Ain says she’s requested Fb to take down a number of posts attacking her, with out success. “They stated it’s not harmful, to allow them to’t take it down. It’s harmful. I hope that Meta would perceive, in Indonesia, it’s harmful,” Ain says.
Different posts have accused Ain of attempting to defraud farmers and of getting an affair with a married man, which she sees as makes an attempt to discredit her that would wind up exposing her to extra threats in the actual world — which has already been hostile to her activism. “Girls who’re being the defenders for my very own group are extra susceptible than males … extra individuals harass you with so many issues,” she says.
Practically two-thirds of people that responded to the World Witness survey stated that they’ve feared for his or her security, together with Ain. She’s been bodily focused at protests in opposition to palm oil firms accused of failing to pay farmers, she tells The Verge. Throughout a protest outdoors of a authorities workplace, males grabbed her butt and chest, she says. Now, when she leads protests, older ladies activists encompass her to guard her as a safety measure.
Within the World Witness survey, almost 1 / 4 of respondents stated they’d been attacked on the premise of their intercourse. “There’s proof of the best way that girls and girls of shade specifically in politics expertise simply huge quantities extra hate than every other group,” Lee says. “Once more, we’re seeing that play out relating to defenders … and the threats of sexual violence, and the impression that that’s having on the psychological well being of numerous these defenders and their capacity to really feel protected.”
“We encourage individuals to make use of tools available on our platforms to assist shield in opposition to bullying and harassment,” Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton stated in an e mail to The Verge, including that the corporate is reviewing Fb posts that focused Ain. Meta additionally pointed to its “Hidden Words” function that permits you to filter offensive direct messages and feedback in your posts and its “Limits” function that hides feedback in your posts from customers that don’t comply with you.
Different firms talked about within the report, together with Google, TikTok, and X, didn’t present on-the-record responses to inquiries from The Verge. Nor did a palm oil company Ain says has been working on native farmers’ land with out paying them, as they’re supposed to do under a mandated profit-sharing scheme.
World Witness says there are concrete steps social media firms can take to handle harassment on their platforms. That features dedicating extra assets to their content material moderation methods, repeatedly reviewing these methods, and alluring public enter on the method. Activists surveyed additionally reported that they assume algorithms that increase polarizing content material and the proliferation of bots on platforms make the issue worse.
“There are a selection of decisions that platforms might make,” Lee says. “Resourcing is a selection, and so they may very well be placing more cash into actually good content material moderation and actually good belief and security [initiatives] to enhance issues.”
World Witness plans to place out its subsequent report on the killings of land and environmental defenders in September. Its final such report discovered that at the very least 196 people were killed in 2023.