Instagram Isn’t Protecting Women Politicians From Hate Speech

Pinned on vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ official Instagram page is a post featuring her alongside her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz. In the comments, along with praise, criticism, and more than one “Trump 2024,” are several comments asking if Harris had offered Walz oral sex, with one calling her “Kamel toe.”

Harris has long been the subject of online abuse, which is likely to intensify as her campaign wears on. But a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that tracks hate speech and misinformation online, found that Instagram failed to remove 93 percent of the 1,000 hateful and violent comments it flagged to the platform targeting both Republican and Democratic female politicians, including Harris.

In doing so, Imran Ahmed, CEO of CCDH, says that the platform is helping to create an environment that discourages women from seeking political office. “It’s an unconscionable, regressive barrier to women’s participation in politics,” he says.

Researchers monitored the accounts of 10 incumbent female politicians in the US for six months. These included five Democrats (Harris, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jasmine Crockett) and five Republicans (Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Anna Paulina Luna, Lauren Boebert, and Maria Elvira Salazar, and Senator Marsha Blackburn). The abuse the researchers observed ranged from death and rape threats to racial slurs and more generally toxic comments.

In one comment directed at Senator Blackburn, a user posted, “Hope someone leaves you for a dead in a ditch.” Another targeting Representative Crockett read, “All these black women trolling her should spend more time not being single mothers, raising the trash that’s destroying your shitty country …” Yet another, this time directed at Representative Pelosi, said, “hope whoever attacked your husband has more people ❤️❤️❤️❤️ so they can finish the job.”

Researchers collected more than half a million comments from 877 Instagram posts between January 1 and June 7, 2024, and, using Google Jigsaw’s Perspective API, analyzed them for content that appeared to violate the platform’s community standards. (Meta’s policies prohibit attacks based on “race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, and serious disease” as well as threats of violence, calls for self-harm, or “severe sexualized commentary.”) The research team then flagged 1,000 abusive comments to the company using its reporting function to see whether they would be removed from the platform.

Some comments, like one that used a racial slur to refer to Representative Crockett, seem to clearly violate Meta’s community standards. Others, like one directed at Vice President Harris saying “GO TO THE BORDER YOU USELESS PIECE OF SHIT !” are what researchers defined as “toxic”—not necessarily a direct threat or slur but a “rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to make someone leave a discussion.” Though they may not cross the line to using sexualized or racialized language that would warrant removal, toxic comments are part of what researchers say creates an overall hostile environment for women politicians online. According to CCDH’s analysis, about one in every 25 comments contained toxic content.