Activists all over the world 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 related to their work. Fb was the most-cited platform, adopted by X, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
World Witness and most of the activists it surveyed are calling on Meta and its friends to do extra to deal with harassment and misinformation on their platforms. Left to fester, they concern 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 greater 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 depressing consequence 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 concern that on-line assaults might gas real-world dangers
World Witness surveyed greater than 200 folks between November 2024 and March of this 12 months that it was in a position to attain by way of 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 members stated they encountered abuse on Fb, 36 p.c on WhatsApp, and 26 p.c on Instagram.
That in all probability displays how common Meta’s platforms are all over the world. 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 method to content material moderation just like X, the place 37 p.c of survey members 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 form of the irony as effectively, of them transferring in the direction of this sort 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 corporations 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 making an attempt to defraud farmers and of getting an affair with a married man, which she sees as makes an attempt to discredit her that might wind up exposing her to extra threats in the true world — which has already been hostile to her activism. “Girls who’re being the defenders for my very own group are extra weak than males … extra folks harass you with so many issues,” she says.
Almost 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 towards palm oil corporations 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 way in which that ladies and ladies 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 in the case of defenders … and the threats of sexual violence, and the impression that that’s having on the psychological well being of plenty of these defenders and their capacity to really feel secure.”
“We encourage folks to make use of tools available on our platforms to assist defend towards bullying and harassment,” Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton stated in an electronic mail to The Verge, including that the corporate is reviewing Fb posts that focused Ain. Meta additionally pointed to its “Hidden Words” function that means that you can 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 corporations 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 corporations can take to deal with harassment on their platforms. That features dedicating extra sources to their content material moderation techniques, often reviewing these techniques, and welcoming 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, they usually could possibly 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 least 196 people were killed in 2023.
