This report was authored by Kristina Wilfore - Kristina is a global democracy activist and elections specialist. She is a co-founder of #ShePersisted, the Global Democracy Advisor at RESET and Adjunct Professor with The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. She is on the advisory board of GW’s Gender Equality Initiative in International Affairs and is a member of the U.S. Institute of Peace Civil Society Working Group.

Report name

A Digital Resilience Toolkit for Women in Politics

Who wrote this report?

#ShePersisted is a non-profit committed to tackling gendered disinformation against women in politics. They research digital harms, support women leaders to build digital resilience and advocate for improved digital standards.

This toolkit brings together existing resources for digital security and tactics for preventing and handling online harms. It targets advice specifically for women elected leaders, activists, election consultants working with women’s campaigns, journalists, and the broader international women’s community, and importantly, puts the spotlight on the fundamental lack of social media and Big Tech accountability which is making the environment for women leaders undermining and dangerous.

Best quote

Pressure needs to stay consistently on social media platforms for true change, but in the meantime women are left to fend for themselves and take personal steps to mitigate harm online to protect themselves. They should not stand alone, however. The best protection from online harms is self-sustaining, to generate organic engagement from a network of people who operate as a community online and a shield to protect women’s leadership. We need to build a global army of online allies and inoculators to share proactive messaging on women leader’s behalf. Silence isn’t always the best option.

**Key takeaways: **

  • Although it can never be foolproof, adopting comprehensive preventative security measures, building supportive online communities, and tightening your digital hygiene before attacks occur can help manage the harm of online targeting. Different incidents of harassment call for varied responses. Sometimes, responding to harassment online can be dangerous, spreading attacks and disinformation and expanding the platform of your online abusers. In other times a response can be warranted and can allow you the ability to expose abuse and push back on the perpetrators, platforms, and general misogynistic narratives. This toolkit is a guide to calibrate responses and help women leaders take back the power and agency to act.
  • Some of the most vicious and coordinated online attacks reportedly occur when women speak out to protect and advance women’s rights, defend fair migration policies or support reasonable climate change initiatives. This is an attack on women, and democracy itself, aided by the tools of tech companies. Meaningful action against online gendered abuse and a shift in thinking about long-term consequences is urgently needed - especially among philanthropy, policymakers, and Big Tech.
  • Tech accountability is the real long-term solution needed. Asking women to bear the burden of protecting themselves - in light of this fundamental lack of corporate accountability and transparency of social media platforms - risks turning attention away from the way that technology, and the choices of large platforms, contributes to a dangerous environment for women leaders, on and offline. Asking women to manage abuse on their own, without reform of digital platforms, is nothing more than a sexist response to sexism online.

What’s in this report?

This toolkit walks women leaders through that process, beginning with preemptively enhancing your digital security through reporting then documenting and responding to attacks online, while obtaining the necessary technical and psychological support throughout.

It also contains messaging strategies for women speaking out on contentious issues, especially ones that are gender-based. The toolkit ends with narrative advice for women politicians responding to the abortion rights debate: a topic for which many leaders are attacked for taking a stand on, but is currently a hot-button issue that has never been more vital to discuss.

Why should you read this report?

There’s a knowledge gap when it comes to understanding gendered disinformation and its implications. The evidence shows that women in politics are the targets of overwhelming volumes of gendered disinformation and online abuse in the forms of fake stories, humiliating or sexually charged images, including photomontages and deepfakes, often aimed at framing them as untrustworthy, unintelligent, and uncontrollable (emotional/angry/crazy). This is a new and frightening barrier to women’s political participation, yet this phenomenon is either normalised, or discourse is overly focused on the perpetrators rather than seeing the tactics behind these attacks as part of the authoritarian playbook.

Fundamentally, #ShePersisted believes that gendered abuse and disinformation, combined with the inaction of social media platforms, in the face of this phenomenon, should be no barrier to the democratic participation of women. As such, women in the public eye should be equipped with the skills necessary for airtight digital hygiene, and feel confident that they are supported when they face online attacks or smear campaigns for simply doing their job. While the ecosystem is not fully built out to support women at this stage, this is a first step to signal what is needed.

It’s for this reason that the Digital Resilience Toolkit is an essential tool to give women access to pre-emptive tools for managing online disinformation attacks, and respond to them effectively. We hope that this toolkit provides a short-term answer to help powerful women around the world maintain and own their positions of influence, and shape their messaging strategies around key contentious issues, until such a time as more long-term, structural solutions can be put in place.

Who is this report for?

At #ShePersisted we have been asked time and time again to create a guide outlining the steps that women in the public spotlight can take to reduce the harms that they face online. We were hesitant to remove the burden off of social media platforms, at the same time we recognize that this is a crisis that cannot only wait for platforms to take responsibility. In response to the stop gap emergency at hand, we created this guide to outline certain steps that can help women pursuing a leadership position to respond to online abuse.

The toolkit targets advice specifically for women elected leaders, activists, election consultants working with women’s campaigns, journalists, and the broader international women’s community. It pulls together best-practice advice from experts in digital policy, online safety, and political communications to give women leaders - for whom an online presence is increasingly essential and increasingly taxing - the best chance of building their brand online, and communicating with constituents, effectively and safely.

🔗 Read the full report here. 🔗

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