On Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s official Instagram page, there’s a post of her alongside her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. In the comments, along with praise, criticism, and more than one “Trump 2024,” there are several comments asking if Harris had offered oral sex to Walz, with one calling her “Kamel toe.”
Harris has It’s been the topic for a long time from online abuse, which will likely intensify as her campaign progresses. 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 on the platform targeting both Republican and Democratic female politicians, including Harris.
Imran Ahmed, executive director of CCDH, says the platform contributes to an environment that discourages women from seeking political office. “It is an unacceptable and regressive barrier to women’s participation in politics,” he says.
Researchers monitored the accounts of 10 female politicians in power in the United States for six months. They included five Democrats (Harris, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Reps. Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jasmine Crockett) and five Republicans (Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Anna Paulina Luna, Lauren Boebert, and Maria Elvira Salazar, and Sen. Marsha Blackburn). The abuse researchers observed ranged from death and rape threats to racial slurs and more generally toxic comments.
In a comment directed at Sen. Blackburn, one user posted, “I hope someone leaves you in a ditch for dead.” Another comment directed at Rep. Crockett read, “All these black women criticizing her should spend more time not being single mothers, raising the trash that is destroying their f***ing country…” Still another, this time directed at Rep. Pelosi, read, “I 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 used Google Jigsaw’s Perspective API to analyze them for content that appeared to violate the platform’s community standards.Meta Policies Prohibit attacks based on “race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, and serious illness,” as well as threats of violenceask self-harm or “severe sexualized comments.”) The research team then flagged 1,000 abusive comments to the company via its reporting feature to see if they would be removed from the platform.
Some comments, like one that used a racial slur to refer to Rep. Crockett, appear to clearly violate Meta’s community standards. Others, like one directed at Vice President Harris that said “GO TO THE BORDER, YOU USELESS PIECES OF SHIT!”, are what researchers defined as “toxic” — not necessarily a direct threat or insult, but a “rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to cause someone to leave a discussion.” While they may not cross the line into using sexualized or racialized language that warrants removal, toxic comments are part of what researchers say creates an overall hostile environment for female politicians online. About one in 25 comments contained toxic content, according to CCDH’s analysis.