Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris' official Instagram page features a post featuring her and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. In the comments, along with praise, criticism, and more than one “Trump 2024,” are several comments asking if Harris offered Walz oral sex, with one calling her “Kamel toe.”
Harris has has long been the subject of online abuse, which is likely to increase 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 to the platform, which targeted both Republican and Democratic female politicians, including Harris.
Imran Ahmed, CEO of CCDH, says the platform is helping to create an environment that discourages women from seeking political office. “It’s an unreasonable, regressive barrier to women’s participation in politics,” he says.
Researchers monitored the accounts of 10 sitting female politicians in the US 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 the researchers observed ranged from death threats and rape threats to racial slurs and more generally toxic comments.
In a comment directed at Senator Blackburn, one user wrote, “I hope someone leaves you for dead in a ditch.” Another comment, directed at Representative Crockett, read, “All those black women trolling her should spend more time not being single mothers, raising the trash that is ruining your shitty country…” Yet another, this time directed at Representative Pelosi, said, “I hope whoever attacked your husband has more people ❤️❤️❤️❤️ so they can get the job done.”
Researchers collected more than half a million comments on 877 Instagram posts between January 1 and June 7, 2024, and analyzed them using Google Jigsaw's Perspective API for content that appeared to violate the platform's community standards.Meta's Policy prohibit attacks based on “race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious belief, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity and serious illness” and threats of violencecalls for self-harm, or “serious sexual commentary.”The research team then reported 1,000 abusive comments to the company through 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 Rep. Crockett, appear to clearly violate Meta’s community standards. Other comments, like one directed at Vice President Harris that says, “GO TO THE BORDER, YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT!” are what researchers defined as “toxic” — not necessarily a direct threat or insult, but a “crude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that could 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. According to CCDH’s analysis, about one in 25 comments contained toxic content.