Online harassment targeted at women significantly increased on social media platforms following the United States presidential election, according to a report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a consortium of independent human rights nonprofits.
Published on Nov. 8, the analysis revealed a surge in content calling for the reversal of women’s and reproductive rights and, in some cases, blatant threats of sexual assault, attributing the spike to President-elect Donald Trump’s election win over Vice President Kamala Harris just a few days prior.
The report details a rise in online posts calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote a century ago, on social media platforms like TikTok, X, Facebook, and Reddit. These same sites saw a notable increase in the use of phrases such as “get back to the kitchen” and “your body, my choice.” The latter, popularized by white nationalist influencer and podcaster Nick Fuentes as a direct response to the reproductive rights slogan “my body, my choice,” increased by 4,600 percent.
The authors of the report said the harassment was likely a result of Harris’ “acute focus” on reaching women voters. For his part, Trump looked to garner support among men.
The posts on social media were met with criticism but still had negative effects, the report said.
“Their spread nevertheless demonstrated the influence of an increasingly vindicative set of online actors, who appear to be using the election results as a permission structure to more overtly and aggressively espouse narratives about curbing women’s rights,” the authors of the report wrote.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue previously documented similar waves in online abuse targeted at public figures and political candidates following the 2020 election and harassment aimed at women leading up to the 2022 midterm elections. This year, digital harassment began weeks before the presidential election.
“While Trump’s victory has been a focal point for communities which support restricting women’s reproductive rights, there was an increase in misogynist content in late October,” the authors said.
Posts about revoking the 19th Amendment began appearing online around Oct. 22 and resurfaced again after the election, some garnering millions of views. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue also identified posts that included sexually violent language alongside the “your body, my choice” tagline.
At the time of the report’s publication, Fuentes’ post had over 35 million views on X.
Users who violate X’s guidelines for abuse and incitement of harassment are liable to have their posts removed or restricted, according to its website.
“We prohibit behavior that encourages others to harass or target specific individuals or groups of people with abuse,” the platform’s policy reads. “This includes, but is not limited to: calls to target people with abuse or harassment online and behavior that urges offline action, such as physical harassment.”
On TikTok women reported abusive comments that were subsequently marked as not violating the platform’s guidelines, the report said.
Asked what social media platforms can or should do in cases involving the proliferation of content calling for harassment, Elissa Redmiles, assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University, said there are many considerations to weigh.
“When we think about these issues, we have to think about: Do we want platforms to be the ones making these choices, or do we want policy or regulation that the platforms then enforce?” Redmiles said. “And I think there are known issues with platforms not necessarily enforcing existing policy and regulation, or not taking down content efficiently. And so whether we want them making their own rules is an open question.”
While the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s report did not include instances where online harassment had materialized into physical harassment offline, there is evidence that the same talking points have spread into daily life. The organization documented cases in which women and young girls in schools and universities have been the victims of misogynistic and threatening rhetoric.
Redmiles, whose research focuses on image-based harassment, previously conducted research that included several cases in which influencers in Pakistan experienced physical harm after being on the receiving end of digital abuse.
She said she recommends that social media users who post regularly be careful about not including images, links, or tags that can be used to identify their location. In some cases, some people create online personas that are separate from their true identity.
Online security experts often recommend that users share less online for their safety, but Redmiles said this “amounts to silencing folks and having less visible presence of, say, women online.”
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