Anika Begay
Pinned to Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s official Instagram page is a post of her with her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. In the comments, along with praise, criticism, and more than one “Trump 2024,” are several comments asking if Harris offered oral sex to Walz, with one calling her “Kamel’s toe.”
Harris has long faced online abuse, which is likely to intensify as her campaign continues. 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 abusive comments it reported to the platform that targeted both Republican and Democratic female politicians, including Harris.
In doing so, CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed says the platform is helping to create an environment that discourages women from seeking political office. “It’s an unconscious and regressive barrier to women’s participation in politics,” he says.
The researchers monitored the accounts of 10 female politicians in office in the United States for six months. They included five Democrats (Vice President Kamala Harris, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jasmine Crockett) and five Republicans (Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Anna Paulina Luna, Lauren Boebert, and Maria Elvira Salazar, and Senator Marsha Blackburn). The abuse the researchers observed ranged from death and rape threats to racial slurs and more general toxic comments.
In a comment directed at Senator Blackburn, one user wrote, “I hope someone leaves you for dead in a ditch.” Another, directed at Representative Crockett, wrote, “All these black women screwing her should spend more time not being single mothers, lifting the garbage that is destroying your shitty country…” Yet another, this time directed at Representative Pelosi, wrote, “I hope whoever attacked your husband has more people ❤️❤️❤️❤️ so they can finish the job.”
The 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’s policies prohibit attacks based on “race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, and serious medical conditions,” as well as threats of violence, calls for self-harm, or “highly sexualized comments.”) The research team then reported 1,000 offensive comments to the company using its reporting function to see if they would be removed from the platform.
Some comments, like one that used a racial slur to refer to Congresswoman Crockett, clearly appear to violate Meta’s community standards. Others, like one directed at Vice President Harris that read, “GET TO THE BORDER, YOU USELESS PIECE OF SHIT!” are what researchers called “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 don’t cross the line and use sexualized or racialized language that would warrant 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 the CCDH analysis.
