Research suggests that over half of all women and girls connected to the internet have personally experienced some form of online harassment, and this is even higher for women who are active in the public sphere, such as journalists, politicians, and human rights defenders. In many of these attacks, women are discredited, dehumanised, and derogated utilising multimodal forms of gendered and sexualised harassment. For instance, creating and sharing pornographic deepfakes, undertaking campaigns of disinformation, and threatening physical and sexual violence, all of which are deliberately aimed at instilling fear, inflicting harm, and undermining gender equality efforts. These types of targeted abuse function as a form of gendered censorship, systematically narrowing the space available for women’s participation and inclusion online and causing widespread harm to victims.
These issues can be seen to belong to the domain of online misogyny, which is broadly understood as expressions of hostility, contempt, or hatred toward women via digital technologies. The prevalence of this type of online violence has increased in parallel with the growth in digital connectivity, with recent research finding that 73% of young people report witnessing misogyny online, and 55% think it is increasing. In fact, misogynistic content is often rewarded due to the effects of algorithmic amplification, whereby controversial and inflammatory content triggers high emotional arousal (both from supporters and critics) and because of high engagement, it is pushed to a wider audience. The impacts of exposure to online misogyny can be severe, impacting the attitudes and behaviours of both men and women and making the online environment less safe for everyone. Also, digital hostility does not remain relegated to online contexts; it acts to legitimise offline gender-based discrimination and violence as well.
Despite the prevalence and impacts of online misogyny, efforts to counter these forms of violence at scale remain limited in effectiveness. A central but underappreciated reason for this is issues with the definition and operationalisation of this concept. Specifically, there is no agreed upon, cross-disciplinary understanding of online misogyny, what it encompasses, or how it should be measured for the purposes of detection or regulatory enforcement. Furthermore, the two research traditions that have engaged most directly with this problem, computer science and social science, have done so largely in isolation from one another, producing conceptual frameworks that are poorly aligned. Notably, although computational approaches have achieved technical sophistication in classifying overt forms of misogynistic content in online discourse, they tend to rely on narrow taxonomies that miss the subtler, multimodal, and contextually embedded forms of violence. In contrast, social scientific work has produced nuanced accounts of misogyny's functions, forms, and intersectional dimensions, but has not translated these into scalable detection tools or operationalisable policy frameworks.
The mismatch in approaches to online misogyny has practical consequences in terms of combating online violence. Specifically, regulations cannot be enforced, nor can regulators evaluate compliance against a set of standards where definitions remain contested. Therefore, addressing the problem of definition and operationalisation of online misogyny is critical for effective governance. To address this issue, the current research aims to explore distinct approaches to understanding and defining online misogyny, its manifestations, and how it perpetuates harm. Further, the brief highlights that inconsistencies in approaches to online misogyny affect how it is measured, detected, and prevented.
