Facebook, Google, TikTok and Twitter have pledged to improve women's safety on their respective platforms, agreeing to a set of commitments during the United Nations Generation Equality Forum.
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The commitments focus on improving abuse reporting systems and offering features that give women more control over their online experience.
They were developed as part of a year-long initiative led by the World Wide Web Foundation. The foundation collaborated with 120 experts from various technology companies, governments, and women who have experienced online abuse. In total, 35 countries were represented. The initiative aimed to co-create solutions to the problems women face online.
The agreement from the four platforms follows an open letter addressed to their respective CEOs. The letter from consortia led by the Web Foundation said it was vital to implement two priorities that women said were critical to their safety: More control over their experiences on the platforms and better reporting systems.
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"Women should have more control over who can interact with them on technology platforms, as well as more choices about the content they see online," the letter said.
“Current tools need to be improved so that women can easily report incidents and track the progress of those reports. If you can offer women access to additional support when needed, that could make a huge difference.”
The giant tech companies (Facebook, Google, TikTok and Twitter) agreed.
According to the foundation created by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, the commitments are a critical step towards addressing widespread online abuse that affects millions of women around the world and poses a growing threat to progress in gender equality.
“The statistics are clear: 38% of women worldwide have directly experienced online abuse,” the foundation said, citing research from The Economist. “This figure rises to 45% for Gen Zs and Millennials. For Black women, LGBTQ+ women and other groups, the abuse is often much worse.”.
“The consequences can be devastating, causing mental and physical harm, silencing women’s voices, and much more.”
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“For too long, women have been harassed and threatened online without the perpetrators coming to any harm,” added Web Foundation senior policy director Azmina Dhrodia. “This is a huge threat to progress towards gender equality. With their resources and reach, these four companies have the power to curb this abuse and improve online experiences for hundreds of millions of women and girls.”
The letter also asked the four CEOs – Shou Zi Chew, Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg – to imagine what they could achieve if they followed through on these commitments.
Information source: zdnet.com
