Journalist organizations call for help amid rise in digital harassment

Troubling rise of right-wing extremism At an international conference, experts are urging policy makers to take action against growing right-wing extremism in Canada.

As online and in-person abuse towards female journalists and politicians appears to be on the rise, coalitions of journalists are calling for lawmakers and police to take a better approach to harassment.

On Aug. 11, the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), along with the Toronto Star, Global News, and The Hill Times, sent a list of demands to the Toronto Police, Ottawa Police, the RCMP, along with four federal ministers and Ontario’s attorney general, in an open letter which aimed to counter recent hostility towards the media.

"Enough is enough. Online hate against journalists must be addressed," the CAJ tweeted on Aug. 11.

The demands included establishing a comprehensive and co-operative approach to online hate across police forces, more efficient processing of complaints about hate speech, and greater transparency and dialogue from police forces to help keep journalists — and all targets of hate — safe.

Rachel Pulfer, the executive director of Journalists for Human Rights, said targeting and harassment of women journalists – and, particularly, women of colour -- is not new.

"What is new is the rate at which we’re seeing it," she told CTV’s Your Morning on Tuesday.

"We’ve seen lots of journalists having trouble getting through to police and then [officers] dismissing the nature of the attacks that they’re receiving," she said.

In an Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of a dozen media organizations in Canada in 2021, 70 per cent of media workers reported experiencing harassment in the past year. Of the surveyed participants, 78 per cent of female journalists said that online harassment had increased in frequency over the previous two years.

A report by UNESCO, which analyzed 2.5 million social media posts and surveyed respondents from 125 countries, determined that online attacks against journalists are commonly linked with disinformation and populist politics, with findings showing that 73 per cent of the respondents identifying as women said they had experienced online hostility.

Pulfer pointed out a distinction between abuse received by male and female reporters.

"What we’ve seen is the kind of threats that men receive are very serious — the Globe and Mail reporters received death threats covering the freedom convoy, for example — but [those threats are generally] related to that man’s work, where as the type of threats where [women reporters] are receiving are deeply disturbing, sexualized, vituperative."

As an example, Pulfer mentioned a female journalist who had a photo of their head superimposed on the body of a porn actress – with those images later circulating online.

"There’s something deeply disturbing about the sexual nature of the way these women are being mischaracterized and attacked on social media," Pulfer said.

When it comes to determining a streamlined approach to tackling online harassment, Pulfer said there is more that could be done to update harassment legislation and keep it aligned with "the proliferation of attacks that we’re seeing on this digital age."