so they are driving up their bottom line by keeping people's interest in horrible, violent, often misogynistic content. and the men who think it's ok to send women abuse online. when i get messages calling me a bitch, do you realise the kind of impact that that has? i don't think it was that bad. we ask is online hate holding women back? things are going backwards for women and we shouldn't stand for it. my name is marianna spring. i'm the bbc�*s disinformation and social media reporter. it's myjob to investigate fake news and conspiracies. i use social media all the time to engage with people who have strong opinions. i don't mind being criticised, but some people really, really hate me. i'm recording this cos last night i received some of the worst abuse i've received doing this job. for the last 18 months, i've been keeping a video diary about the abusive messages i get. bleep you you silly bitch, you daft cow, you are a miserable bleep get laid. many of the messages are too offensive to broadcast unedited. they include rape threats and repeated use of the c word and fword. when are you killing yourself, bitch? have a nice afterlife, you wretched pig. i love doing myjob and i think it's so important but it's horrible being on the receiving end of that abuse. i'm not alone. getting hate like this is something many women now experience on social media. i'm kaz kamwi, i'm a fashion bloggerfrom essex. i'm priya. i am a medical student in my fifth year. kas and priya were both contestants on love island this year. right, no pressure. i reckon shake it and then... they weren't allowed to use social media on the island so didn't find out what had been posted about them until they got home. initially i was like so excited coz i was like guys what's it been like being on like your side like you've been watching me like what, what is going on? so theyjust showed me all like love and support that i'd been receiving, they had screen shots of like really lovely messages of people saying i inspired them. but it wasn't all positive. then obviously they let me know like there was a moment you know, a few moments er when you did receive quite a lot of hate and backlash. knowing that that even happened was just horrible to know. just getting called a slut, a whore, just a bitch. to be like, "you black bitch you need to die", like that's not acceptable at all. kaz�*s sister banji managed her accounts while she was on the show. i think it was hard just because obviously your instagram was on my phone so like i think i probably saw a lot more than people realised that i did, like i didn't want to go downstairs to my mum and be like, "oh here's another one, here's another one", ijust had to be like, "0k, just block and delete, block and delete. " so ijust think yeah, it was, it was a lot to handle. priya's accounts were run by a few of her friends. i got words thrown at me, slut, whore, those kind of words which a man definitely wouldn't have had. i actually think it was more difficult for them seeing all the trolling than it was for me because i expected it. and i don't think they were fully prepared for it, even though i'd inform them that there was going to be this sort of behaviour. i think they felt quite defensive. they wanted to send messages back. you can see there is a lot of explicit language, a lot of negative stereotypes. the think tank, demos, analysed more than 94,000 posts and comments about contestants on love island and another reality tv show, married at first sight. so, reality tv is a great place to start looking at online hate because it is so popular with people expressing who they like or don't like, and we also see that the contestants are a relatively equal mix of men and women and from lots of different backgrounds so it gives us an opportunity to analyse those differences in how the public are responding to them. the researchers found women contestants received more abusive messages than the men, and that the abuse was focused on their gender. people were using explicitely gendered slurs — women being manipulative, women being sneaky, being sexual, women being evil or stupid, whereas what we saw with men was men being attacked for seemingly not being masculine enough, for being too weak. we also see that women contestants who are women of colour are receiving more pernicious attacks as well based on their race. i am a dark skinned black woman that's the first thing you see. i think to get attacked on that is so hurtful and so harmful. and the fact that my family were exposed to that breaks my heart. it got so bad banji posted a message begging people to stop. it was just too much to take, so ijust thought let me just put the message out there and with the response from that like it was more positive than negative. as a social media influencer, kaz�*s following has skyrocketed and that means she gets much more hate. there's sometimes an attitude in society that this kind of abuse. my instagram that's my work place. no—one walks in to their office and has people yelling abuse at them do they? so why shouldn't it be the same thing on my instagram? for more and more women, social media is essential for their work. that's cos you gave me a no ball. rachel clarke is a doctor. she lives in 0xfordshire with her family and worked on covid wards during the pandemic. i'm somebody who as as a doctor is very active on social media, precisely because i see that as an extension of my medicine. she encourages people to getjabbed on twitter. it's led to some awful abuse. yeah, this one, you are a vile, nasty woman. nuremberg trials are coming for you and all your comrades that have pushed the covid lie. you look at your phone and you read somebody who is telling you, as an nhs doctor, that they want to rape you until you need one of your own ventilators. you will be accused of being a whore or a slut. you will be threatened physically, sexually as well as verbally. rachel hoped twitter would stop the worst of the abuse. i have reported misogynistic abuse, threats of rape, threats of being killed over and over again. most of those reports have never resulted in anyone being blocked or issued with a temporary ban on twitter. new research suggests, 97% of accounts reported to twitter and instagram for targeting women with hate, are not taken down. twitter and instagram say they take action when their rules are violated and closing accounts isn't the only option. like the love island contestants rachel's convinced she's getting this kind of abuse because she's a woman. it is always female members of the nhs who seem to incur the worse and most vicious pile ons. and the nature of the abuse is different too, you willjust be told to bleep off if you're a male doctor. but if you're a female doctor, it'll be much more personal and visceral and it will target you as a woman. so who is abusing women online? thirty people, mainly men, regularly send me horrible messages. at first glance, some of their profiles look pretty normal. that suggests they are a health care assistant. they're actually a big spurs fan and i'm also a spurs fan. so it looks like he lives in great yarmouth. i make them angry because as part of myjob, i challenge the fake news they believe in. 0h, he doesn't believe in 9/11. he's often posting about a number of conspiracy theories, about the pandemic. i ask some of them why they think it's ok to abuse me. one of them gets back to me. steve's a van driver from the midlands. the messages he sends aren't the worst i get. but in the last year, he's sent at least 19 nasty messages. he agrees to talk and is happy for the call to be recorded. when i get messages calling me a bitch, do you realise the impact that has? i don't think it was that bad. you're not the only person sending me messages like that. you won't listen to other arguments, you're fixed on this bbc propogranda. if you messaged me in the first place and just said to me, "oh, you know, i'm worried about this", and told me it in a way that was a fair enough expression of your criticism. i probably make a mistake, you know, yeah, i'm a pretty fair bloke. he tells me he gets abusive messages himself. from who? who do you get them from? from people who believe, you know, global warming and 9/11 wasn't a lie. if you know what it feels like, why do you send it to other people? ijust brush it off, darling, i accept there's idiots out there. do you send messages like the ones you sent me to other people? do you often do that? yeah, sometimes i feel a bit frustrated. steve admits he's made a mistake and since we spoke he's stopped sending me abuse. opinions on social media are becoming increasingly polarised. that means politicians get targeted with abuse. some women mps says they're constantly bombarded with sexualised and violent threats. the attacks that have come directly to me have been about my politics, some about my physical appearance, a lot has been about the fact that i am gay and a lot of it has been about the fact that i am a woman who has opinions. i'm declaring ruth davidson the duly elected leader ruth is the former i'm declaring ruth davidson the duly elected leader... ruth is the former leader of the scottish conservatives. she's now out of frontline politics. the one thing i don't miss is the abuse. these are just words, can they really do harm? before social media existed, people could be done for being threatening in the street and real life for some of the things that they said and the hate speech that they had. the fact that they are talking directly to someone on line, through the medium of their phone, doesn't stop that being threatening. the reason people attack strong women or qualified women or expert women is because they don't like either what they are trying to say or the very fact of who it is that is saying it. i will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. i will not. when she made this speech, julia gillard was the prime minister of australia. not now. not ever. she was furious when the leader of the opposition called her government sexist. i will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. i will not. nearly a decade later, young women on tiktok have made her words famous all over again. because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern australia, he doesn't need a motion in the house of representatives, he needs a mirror. she too sees how men and women are treated differently. men in politics get criticism too. social media cartoonists, you know, opinion pieces pointing out their flaws. but there's something qualitatively different about what happens to women. i mean, the threats of violence, including sexual violence. the endless focus on appearance. you know — you're too ugly, too fat, too this, too that. the focus on private life. these are the sorts of things that happened to me and i know happen to other women and really don't happen to men. she's now out of office and still campaigning against misogyny. i think it is designed to exclude, to intimidate women out of the public square, to take up the pressures and hopefully from the eyes of those who are doing the trolling and the hate, get them to retreat. i think they probably see that as a victory. it can end women's aspirations, hold them back from doing what they otherwise would have done and done very well. i'm getting increasingly concerned about some of the more threatening abuse i receive. the united nations asked over 700 women, mainlyjournalists and some political activists, who are prominent on social media, about their experiences of online hate. they then studied some of the accounts, including mine. this is a word cloud that represents the abuse you have experienced. the bigger the word, the more times it's been directed against you within abusive tweets. and you can see that this is a word cloud full of expletives, full of demeaning comments, full of misogynistic comments, full of sexually explicit comments. but the biggest word that we see is the word liar. one in five of the women who responded to the un survey, say they experienced harm in the real world which they believe was linked to their online abuse. we found examples of women who were being followed, women who were threatened themselves face to face, stalkers who turned up to workplaces. so how worried should i be? i'm concerned for you, marianna. i have watched the way you're attacked. it's fantastic that you're well supported. but we know from our data that you're much more likely to be targeted, and severely targeted if you're reporting on disinformation, which you are doing. one thing that i think that people perhaps don't understand so much is what it's like to live with the constant worry that something might happen. and the... just how tiring that is. sorry. it's ok. i really, i applaud you for doing this to start with. and it's so legitimate. it is, it is exhausting, it's emotionally exhausting, it's terrifying, it steals your sleep, it puts you on edge. for the past six months i've been anxious enough to report the most serious hate i receive to the police. i've now reported the latest new batch of threats and abuse, some that really frightened me because they seemed much more violent. particularly because one of the people appears to have a prior conviction for stalking and harrassment. sending grossly offensive or obscene messages online intending to cause distress can be a crime. i'm about to meet with my police liaison officer for the first time. i reported a whole batch of abuse in april, threats, misogyny, sexualised comments, people saying they wanted me executed. the meeting didn't go well. i've just come out of my meeting with my liaison officer. he admitted that they lost portfolios of evidence that i shared with them in handovers. he admitted he hadn't had the time to pursue this stuff. he admitted that he wasn't the right officer to be assigned to this, that he doesn't have the specialist knowledge to look into this. since then, my case has been passed from one liaison officer to another. i'm now on number three. he asked me if i could go through the portfolio of evidence i shared with the met months ago and label the posts again as he doesn't know how to use instagram and twitter. the officer requested more information about my abuse from the social media sites but six weeks later there's still no progress. the metropolitan police say they take reports of online abuse very seriously and that my case is under active investigation. over the past five years, there's been a 107% increase in people, mainly women, reporting online hate. but over the same period, only a 32% increase in the number of arrests. dr rachel clarke has reported the worst of her abuse to the police but no one's been arrested. never have i heard anyone from the police standing up to say nobody gets to issue rape threats to an nhs doctor or nurse because they are telling the truth about covid. why are institutions and individuals in power in british society not standing up and saying, enough, you don't get to do that. we are going to prosecute you all because this is unacceptable. i think the police have a hellishjob. i don't know how we are going to manage this is future. but we do have to try harder because this is real. it's affecting the way people live their lives. in a small number of cases it's affecting how people are threatened in the real world, outside the world of online harm. but also it's affecting the health and mental health particularly of our young people who have bullying and oppression online. that does impact them in a very real way, even if it doesn't result in an attack, physical attack offline. the national police chiefs council says the police take all reports of malicious communications seriously and will investigate but must prioritise their finite resources . the main social media companies say they don't promote hate on their platforms and take action to stop it. they each have algorithms that offer us content based on things we've posted, liked or watched in the past. internet researcher chloe colliver is helping us run an experiment to test the algorithms. what we're not able to see as researchers, journalists or the public, is the way that platforms themselves recommend information to different people. so really, some of the only ways to do this are, like, creating a profile, and seeing the kind of rabbit hole that it might be lead down by the platform itself. so, meet barry. he's not real and neither is this profile picture. we've set up accounts in his name on facebook, instagram, twitter, tiktok and youtube. we switched on all the privacy settings to protect other users, and barry didn't send any abuse. but we've designed him to be just like the people who abuse me. he's mainly interested in anti—vax content and conspiracy theories and also follows some accounts hostile to women. so engaging with that conspiracy content and also engaging with a little bit of the misogynistic content. yes, definitely. i think it's important to capture the misogynistic side of the accounts that you've said have sent you this kind of abuse. right from the start barry engaged with content recommended to him by the social media platforms. after two weeks, tiktok hadn't promoted any anti—women content, and not much was suggested by twitter either. but youtube had offered some videos hostile to women. and on facebook and instagram barry was recommended more and more anti—women content. some involving disturbing sexual violence. what i think is really shocking is the extremity of some of this content, that's being revealed within just a couple of weeks of quite minimal activity that you conducted using this account. farfrom stopping barry engaging with anti—women content, facebook and instagram appear to have promoted it. there was very little activity that was chosen by you to actually directly search for something. so what that implies is that the platforms themselves have sent this profile the majority of this content themselves and selected it, curated it and targeted it. so actually, this profile, if it were a real person, would have been brought into a hateful community full of misogynistic content very, very quickly within two weeks. facebook, which also owns instagram, says it tries not to recommend content that breaks it rules and is improving its technology "to find and remove abuse more quickly." youtube says it has "strict policies" on hate and "quickly" removes content that breaks its rules. that wasn't the only thing in the experiment that struck me. 0riginally barry's main interest was conspiracy theories. at the start i had expected him to be inundated with that sort of content, but he wasn't. that could be because facebook has been pressured to take action on other issues like covid misinformation, anti—vaccine misinformation, by the press, by policymakers and the public, whereas they haven't really been pressured in the same way to take action on harassment against women or violent content targeting women online. so it seems they can adjust their algorithms when they want to. the people who have been smart enough to create these online platforms for us, i think are smart enough to work the system so that this online hatred can be, if not entirely eradicated, then substantially diminished. nearly three billion people worldwide use facebook. last year it made on average $31 in advertising revenue per user. the longer people stay on the platform, the more the tech giant makes. that sensational or extreme or anger—inducing content keeps your attention longer and therefore allows them to send more adverts. so they are driving up their bottom line by keeping people's interest in horrible, violent, often misogynistic content. facebook say "protecting" their community is "more important than maximising profits." and after we wrote to facebook they announced new measues to tackle sexualised hate targeting journalists, politicians and celebrities on their sites. the un's drawing up plans to get all the social media companies to do much more to protect women. they are proposing they label accounts posting hate targeted at women, employ more human moderators, and install early warning systems for women who fear online abuse could escalate into real world harm. the business models, the infrastructure, the design of these platforms is absolutely part of the problem and until that's radically overhauled we're not going to see a resolution on anywhere near the scale that we need to see. they also want governments to take tougher action. in the uk, long awaited online safety legislation is still being discussed. it's expected to say social media companies have a duty of care to their users, and can be fined if they fail to protect them. but there's no specific mention of online hate against women. the uk is looking at a range of regulatory responses. i think that we need to be cautious whenever it comes to regulating speech, but we can no longer afford to use that as justification for sitting back and doing nothing. the 0nline harms bill. it's not going to be a magic wand. it's not going to fix everything overnight. many people will think it goes too far. many people think it goes not far enough, and parts of it will be obsolete by the time it becomes law because of how fast technology is moving. but at least you've got parliamentarians grappling with one of the big issues of the day. my investigation comes at a time when women are increasingly standing up against hate and violence both online and in the real world. i think we've got to push back. i think we have to challenge. i don't think that it is in anybody's interests for women who are consistently abused in a way that a man wouldn't be to let other young women who are online and seeing that abuse think that'sjust the way things are. that's not what we've been taught. that's not what my generation's been taught about fighting for equality. and if this is one of the fights that we're having right now, then this is one of the fights we're having right now. for women of all ages that means refusing to be bullied off social media. i feel like it's important that we don't let this affect us and carry on posting and sharing things and having normal social media habits. i am just as human as you and it hurts me in the same way as this would hurt you and i would never wish for anyone to experience it. i would never wish that at all. i carry on tweeting and i carry on speaking out on social media because i will not allow misogynistic bullies and trolls to prevent me from connecting with the public. this is bbc news. our top stories: a report recommending that steve bannon, a key ally of donald trump, be held in contempt, is approved by us lawmakers investigating january's riot on capitol hill. ahead of a key climate change summit — the uk government unveils plans to be carbon neutral by 2050. north korea says it's successfully tested a new submarine—launched ballistic missile — the white house has condemned the launch. and the oscar—winning

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