Virtual attacks by politicians and online trolls threaten freedom of expression worldwide.
Fatu Camara (right) discusses the persecution she faces from politicians and online trolls as an independent journalist in The Gambia during a WPFD event.
NEW YORK — The Azerbaijani government tried to blackmail investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova by placing a camera in her bedroom, creating “intimate life videos” to get her to stop publishing critical stories, she said. “Then when I didn’t agree to step back, the video was published.”
“Something like that was done to me, too,” said Gambian journalist Fatu Camara. “They took a video from a porn site and put my face on it and said that that was me and shared it all over the country.”
Their experiences are not unusual. Two in three women in media report online harassment, according to a report by the International Women’s Media Foundation. At a World Press Freedom Day discussion on Columbia University’s campus, two of the three female journalists present mentioned facing gendered online attacks from either their governments, politicians or online trolls.
Dana Green, senior legal counsel at the New York Times, said in an interview after the event that threats against women and other people who hold minority identities — their sexuality, race or religion, for instance — have two main impacts on the profession. First, attacks like the ones described by Ismayilova and Camara push people out of journalism.
“I think we — the news industry in general, not just The Times — have been very cognizant in recent years that who tells the news,” Green said, pausing, “it matters.” That is why newsrooms have focused on building more inclusive, diverse workspaces, especially through recruiting people from across racial and economic backgrounds. “If every single day, you are being subjected to threats against your life, threats against your family — that has an impact on retention of talent in the field.”
“In The Gambia,” Camara said, “we do not get killed. Journalists are not being killed, we’re not being beaten. But still, there are a lot of verbal assaults against journalists, especially if you’re a woman, a journalist and you’re not married. That is always a problem because what they use to shut you down is that you sleep with everyone. So when you live in a country like The Gambia — 95% Muslim — that gets a lot of people to be quiet.”
Second, Green said, harassment, intimidation and attacks like this make the news cost more to cover. “The Times robustly invests in a security team, in psychological support, in practical support for our journalists,” she said, mentioning she was not speaking in an official capacity for the Times. “That has a cost. Like all costs, every cost you add to telling the news makes it harder for local news, for independent media, for non-profit media to operate.”
Not only are women facing online harassment, they are also dealing with a larger problem facing journalists generally. Local media is essential for holding authority accountable around the world. But in places where journalists are under attack, that task becomes much harder.
For instance, in Azerbaijan, where Ismayilova said in-home video surveillance of her was released to intimidate her, media outlets are now required to register and apply for a license to operate. Additionally, the law requires founders of, or majority shareholders in, companies to reside in the country, which limits foreign funding that Ismayilova says is necessary for independent reporting.
“We have a huge number of the websites and media organizations which are praising the president,” Ismayilova said. People who do critique the government face online hacking episodes and court-sanctioned website blocking. “People are under digital surveillance all the time,” she said. “We have problems with speaking to our sources of information because they are being exposed by digital surveillance.”
“You can’t report the news if you can’t communicate with sources and if you can’t do so candidly,” Green said. “In the U.S. we have really robust protections against being compelled to disclose your source. And also robust protections against law enforcement using indirect methods to identify your sources.” Both of those intimidation strategies — especially the latter — are being used in countries around the world to inhibit the work that journalists are doing.
For Green, the experiences that face journalists, especially women journalists, around the world are deeply connected to the state of journalism in the U.S., too. Green said the legal protections we rely on in the U.S. could be changing with upcoming Supreme Court decisions in Gonzalez v. Google LLC and Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh. “Freedom of expression doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” she said.
Although the work can be overwhelming, Green said, she chose to focus her career on freedom of expression because she believes it is the foundation of other human rights. “Without the ability to debate and freely discuss issues, you can’t take action on them,” she said. “Whatever issue you care about and whichever side of it you’re on, your ability to engage with that issue and to advance your perspective depends upon your ability to communicate.”
