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"You have to prove the threat is real": Understanding the needs of Female Journalists and Activists to Document and Report Online Harassment

Nitesh Goyal, Leslie Park, Lucy Vasserman

Abstract

Online harassment is a major societal challenge that impacts multiple communities. Some members of community, like female journalists and activists, bear significantly higher impacts since their profession requires easy accessibility, transparency about their identity, and involves highlighting stories of injustice. Through a multi-phased qualitative research study involving a focus group and interviews with 27 female journalists and activists, we mapped the journey of a target who goes through harassment. We introduce PMCR framework, as a way to focus on needs for Prevention, Monitoring, Crisis and Recovery. We focused on Crisis and Recovery, and designed a tool to satisfy a target's needs related to documenting evidence of harassment during the crisis and creating reports that could be shared with support networks for recovery. Finally, we discuss users' feedback to this tool, highlighting needs for targets as they face the burden and offer recommendations to future designers and scholars on how to develop tools that can help targets manage their harassment.

"You have to prove the threat is real": Understanding the needs of Female Journalists and Activists to Document and Report Online Harassment

Abstract

Online harassment is a major societal challenge that impacts multiple communities. Some members of community, like female journalists and activists, bear significantly higher impacts since their profession requires easy accessibility, transparency about their identity, and involves highlighting stories of injustice. Through a multi-phased qualitative research study involving a focus group and interviews with 27 female journalists and activists, we mapped the journey of a target who goes through harassment. We introduce PMCR framework, as a way to focus on needs for Prevention, Monitoring, Crisis and Recovery. We focused on Crisis and Recovery, and designed a tool to satisfy a target's needs related to documenting evidence of harassment during the crisis and creating reports that could be shared with support networks for recovery. Finally, we discuss users' feedback to this tool, highlighting needs for targets as they face the burden and offer recommendations to future designers and scholars on how to develop tools that can help targets manage their harassment.
Paper Structure (50 sections, 6 figures, 2 tables)

This paper contains 50 sections, 6 figures, 2 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. Online harassment
  4. Journalists' Experiences, Needs, and Challenges
  5. Need for evidence to manage online harassment
  6. Related Works - Solutions for managing online harassment
  7. Content Moderation
  8. Platform enforced strategies
  9. Tools tailored for targets
  10. Method
  11. Participants
  12. Exploratory and Validation Phase Analysis
  13. Exploratory Phase Findings
  14. Trajectory of harassment and challenges faced by journalists/activists
  15. Before an Attack
  16. ...and 35 more sections

Figures (6)

  • Figure 1: Stages of Online Harassment: Before, During, and After
  • Figure 2: Homepage where a person can view all the comments that have been captured via connection with the back-end and the API
  • Figure 3: Homepage where a person can choose to filter based on dates, including certain keywords/hashtags/usernames etc.
  • Figure 4: Aggregating Comments/Data from Platforms and using Filters to include/exclude data to manage volume
  • Figure 5: Adding aggregated data to a Report that can be downloaded or shared with support network
  • ...and 1 more figures