For women in politics, social media is a double-edged sword

One year after the midterm election in which women won an unprecedented number of seats in the U.S. House and Senate, and one year away from the first presidential election since the explosion of the #MeToo movement, it’s hard not to think we live in times of great opportunities for women’s representation in this country and around the world.

But even as more women are running for office, they face not only the usual scrutiny involved in assuming a public role, but also a greater degree of danger due to the ways that women are targeted for threats, intimidation, and personal attacks through social media. Women know that cyber violence can strike at any time, with very little accountability for the perpetrators.

With this in mind, I wanted to know: Is social media making it harder for women to enter and succeed in the field of politics?

As a gender expert and global fellow at the Wilson Center, I went about finding a response to this question by conducting interviews with women political leaders and experts from 30 countries, reviewing existing research on this topic, and asking Marvelous AI, a data analytics firm, to review the Twitter and news coverage of the Democratic primary for the 2020 presidential elections in the United States.

The result was #ShePersisted: Women, Politics & Power in the New Media World, a global research report painting a complex picture of social media as a double-edged sword for female politicians — enabling them to engage with their constituencies without intermediation, but exposing them to high risks.

On one hand, online violence and trolling against women in politics is a global phenomenon, as many of the women I interviewed from countries as diverse as the United States, Ukraine, Italy, and India told me they had been targets of similar attacks.

For example, Ukrainian member of parliament Svitlana Zalishchuk told me: “I myself have experienced a situation when one absurd fake produced by Russian websites was actively picked up in social media and shared by Ukrainian users. Aimed at discrediting me as a politician, the story was suggesting that I made a promise in my Facebook post to run naked through Kyiv once the town in the east of Ukraine Debaltseve is taken by the Russian-backed separatists. ‘Substantiated’ with a fake screenshot of the post, the story kept circulating on the internet for a year, objectifying my sex and distancing discourse about my personality from the professional area.”

Amanda Renteria, president of Emerge America and candidate for California governor, told me that, as national political director of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, she was targeted by Russian operatives in a fake memo retrieved by the FBI. After a story about the memo appeared in The Washington Post, she said, “I received hateful DMs, etc. from QAnon [a far-right conspiracy theory] efforts/groups. Frankly, it was a sobering experience about our world.”

In the United States, there is evidence that female presidential candidates are targets of more attacks from right-wing and fake-news accounts than male politicians, and the narratives underlying their attacks are overwhelmingly negative and focused on their character, as opposed to their policies or electability. A recent survey of women parliamentarians from all over the world found that 41.8% of the respondents had seen extremely humiliating or sexually charged images of them spread through social media, including photomontages showing them nude. Female politicians who belong to religious minorities are at even greater risk of becoming targets of disinformation campaigns, as uncovered by a recent article from The Guardian.

According to UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka: “When women suffer this violence online, the aim is no different than offlined — to control, assert power over, silence, and keep women out of the conversation or from participating and benefitting equally from that space.”

Nevertheless, the majority of the women politicians I interviewed globally told me that social media is a very useful tool for them, as it provides them with something they had not had before: the ability to drive their own narratives, free from the sexism and marginalization of traditional media outlets that make them invisible or trivialize them. Comfort Doyoe Cudjoe-Ghansah, member of parliament and second deputy minority whip in Ghana, told me that social media played “a vital role” in her political career, as it enabled her to showcase her work to her constituents and receive support and encouragement from them, counterbalancing the “negative picture” that her opponents had painted of her.

Based on available research and my interviews with political strategists and female politicians who reported using the online space successfully for their advantage, some recommendations and best practices emerge.

Firstly, responding to attacks and calling out sexism pays off. A study developed by Lake Research Partners for the Women’s Media Center found that when a female candidate calls out sexism and responds to negative ads, she recovers voters’ confidence and improves her image.

Secondly, having a community of online supporters ready to mobilize is key. As Celinda Lake, a prominent pollster and political strategist, explains: “Though [candidates] will receive misogynistic responses from opponents and trolls online, because of their higher public profile and the large reach of social media, positive responses from women and men can overwhelm the negative comments.” Such was the case for Laura Boldrini, an Italian congresswoman who was the target of vicious online attacks from men threatening to rape and murder her: “As I exposed and denounced the trolls and harassers, thousands of people came to my defense online, claiming the digital space as an arena to denounce sexism and shape the political discourse.”

Finally, engaging with followers is extremely important. Research on Senate races in the United States shows that it is beneficial for female candidates to use Twitter in an interactive and personalized way, as there was a direct correlation between women’s online engagement and their likelihood to win elections. Interestingly, the opposite is true for men, as the winning male candidates had a less personalized and interactive use of social media.

While some female politicians have been able to use social media to advance their political ambitions, many young women are reluctant to run for office because of concerns about online attacks — a strong disincentive and one more barrier among the many that are stacked against them. But this problem isn’t without solutions. My research, as well as that of others, outlines evidence-based recommendations that, if implemented, would go a long way toward ensuring that the digital space becomes a more gender-equal arena for political engagement. They include:

• Using technological innovations to address online sexism, gender-based hate speech, and harassment: As algorithms have played a clear role in spreading misogyny and other biases, they can equally be deployed to raise awareness regarding unfair coverage.
• Improving user accountability and ensuring that social media companies identify, track, and remove abusive content and hate speech in a more transparent and consistent manner.
• Offering media and information literacy (MIL) courses as a core part of school curricula and helping young people develop the ability to consume and create media content in a positive, thoughtful, and effective way.
• Ensuring that female candidates globally receive trainings and information on how to use social media in a way that is safe and effective, for example using tools like #think10, an online self-assessment and safety planning tool developed by the National Democratic Institute.

Despite evidence that gender-balanced institutions are much stronger and women’s participation in governance increases the public’s trust in democracy and reduces corruption, hardly any of these solutions are being implemented on a broad scale. While universities, foundations, global nonprofits, billionaire philanthropists, and think tanks are increasingly paying attention to the issue of democracy and technology — and investing millions of dollars and significant brainpower to address internet freedom, disinformation, hate speech, incitement, and foreign interference in elections — they are generally entirely gender blind in their efforts and are completely overlooking the very specific and all too real concerns and threats that women in politics face.

It's critical that further investments go into tracking, understanding, and ultimately combating gendered disinformation campaigns and online violence against women in politics. Only then, women will truly be able to take advantage of the opportunities for political activism, outreach, and engagement that social media represents and exercise their political rights on equal terms.

It’s urgent, too, because there is no more effective way to estrange the general population from government than to ensure that half of them are prevented from fully engaging in it — and the global challenges the planet faces are too big for us to rely on only half of our talent pool to solve them.