Civil Society Defintions of Online Misogyny
Civil society is probably the best place to look for the most progressive and accurate understanding of online misogyny
- Womens Media Center
- Take back the Tech
- Fix the Glitch
- Fawcett Society
- Amnesty International, Troll Patrol
- Amnesty International, Toxic Twitter
- Tactical Technology Collective
The WMC is a media site for women and about womens issues. They carry out research, make reports and write features from "progressive women's perspectives on both headline stories and events and trends ignored or misrepresented in the mainstream media". They also have a radio show called WMC live.
There Speech Project is focused raising public and media awareness on online harassment. In this area they make two distinctions on their website between misogyny and online harassment but the articles are often duplicated across the sections.
Their best resource is probably the abuse wheel and their page titled Online Abuse 101
Here they define
Gender-based Slurs and Harassment
Name-calling is common online. Gendered harassment, however, involves the use of words, insults, profanity and, often, images to communicate hostility towards girls and women because they are women. Typically, harassers resort to words such as “bitch,” “slut,” “whore,” or “cunt” and include commentary on women’s physical appearances.
Hate Speech
Hate speech has no uniform legal definition. Online, this means that every social media platform has its own unique definition. As a baseline, however, hate speech is language or imagery that denigrates, insults, threatens, or targets and individual or groups of people on the basis of their identity – gender, based on race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, or other traits. There is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Hate speech usually has specific, discriminatory harms rooted in history and usually employs words, action and the use of images meant to deliberately shame, annoy, scare, embarrass, humiliate, denigrate, or threaten another person. Most legal definitions of harassment take into consideration the intent of the harasser. This, however, fails to translate usefully in the case of cyberharassment, the use of the Internet, electronic and mobile applications for these purposes. In the case of technology enabled harassment and abuse, intent can be difficult to prove and diffuse. For example, most laws do not currently consider third party communications to be harassing. So, whereas the law understands sending someone a threatening message for the purposes of extortion, it does not understand the non-consensual sharing of sexual images to someone other than the subject of the photograph to be illegal or hateful.
They seem to use harassment as a general term and then try and specify different tactics used by harassers.
"It's a global, collaborative campaign project that highlights the problem of tech-related violence against women, together with research and solutions from different parts of the world"
They define hatespeech as:
Hate speech includes written, spoken or visual discrimination, harassment, threats or violence against a person or group on the basis of their gender, disability, sexual orientation, race, etc.
Any speech that trivialises, glorifies or incites violence against women is hate speech, just as speech that trivialises the Holocaust is anti-semitic and speech that glorifies attacks on people because of their race is racist.
Further useful defintions of ICT and GBV can be found here
Takes definitions from womens media center
Abusive: go against twitters community guidelines
Problematic: inflict harm on target
"Violence and abuse against women on Twitter takes various forms, including direct or indirect threats of physical or sexual violence; abuse targeting one or more aspects of a woman’s identity, such as racism or transphobia; targeted harassment; privacy violations such as doxing (uploading private identifying information publicly to cause alarm or distress); and the sharing of sexual or intimate images of a woman without her consent. The aim of this violence and abuse is to create a hostile online environment for women with the goal of shaming, intimidating, degrading, belittling and ultimately silencing them."
Source
From Online Harassment of Politically - Active Women
About the ongoing lack of definitional clarity:
"First of all, most of the terms associated with the concept of online harassment have changed and evolved over the past decade, as academics, practitioners and policy makers have developed new understandings and approaches. Secondly, most definitions are either too academic, legal or technical, which makes it difficult for everyday users of digital technologies to easily understand this fundamental problem."
Online harassment: The use of the digital technologies to harass, threaten and/or attack a person or community
Cyber harassment: Relating to all kinds of harassment that take place on the internet and are exercised through digital devices
Online gendered harassment: Harassment of individuals and/or communities based on their gender identity, specifically targeting women, trans*, queer, non-binary and gender non-conforming individuals
Online abuse: Abusive behaviour incited through digital technologies to attack, threaten, intimidate or incite violence on individuals and/or communities
Tech-mediated violence against women/ tech-related violence against Women (VAW)/ online violence against women: An umbrella term referring to all types and strategies of violence targeting women online through the use of digital technologies, which includes regulating their use of digital devices, limiting their ownership of devices, surveilling their online activity, as well as online harassment and abuse
Online Gender Based Violence: Violence incited on women, trans*, queer, non-binary and gender non-conforming individuals as a direct consequence of their gender identity through the use of digital technologies
Cyber violence against women and girls: A term specifically established and used by the UN Broadband Commission and UN Women to refer to online harassment targeting women and girls
They additionally define a wide range of abusive tactics