Twitter failing women as online abuse flourishes

Many women cannot express themselves freely on Twitter without fear of violence or abuse, Amnesty International said yesterday, even though the #MeToo campaign has helped women to speak out. Abuses ranged from ‘doxing' - releasing personal documents such as a person's address or children's names - to posting nude pictures, the rights group said, as it launched a campaign to get Twitter to step up its response to violations.

"Many women are logging onto Twitter to find death threats, rape threats and racist or homophobic slurs littering their feeds," Azmina Dhrodia, a researcher with Amnesty and author of its #ToxicTwitter report, said in a statement.

"If Twitter is allowing violence and abuse against women to flourish on the platform, the danger is that someone experiencing that will censor or silence themselves as a result," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The report follows an international study this month that found women politicians on Twitter were judged more harshly than their male peers on appearance and marital status, and were three times more likely to receive sexist comments.