Julie Posetti is Senior Research Fellow ved Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. Centre for Freedom of the Media. Dr Posetti brings over two decades of high-level international journalism practice to her research, including time as a news editor, documentary reporter and national political correspondent with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). In this capacity, she was awarded the Australian Human Rights Awards for Radio for her coverage of Indigenous affairs, the resurgence of the ‘racist right’, and systemic child abuse in state care. She was also a recipient of the Australian National Press Club’s ‘German Award for Journalism’. More recently, her work has been published by The Atlantic, Harvard University’s Nieman Lab, the BBC, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian.
DJRG Fellow, November 2019
She is also a former Research Fellow and Editor with the Paris-based World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and the World Editors’ Forum, where she led their flagship international industry report Trends in Newsrooms. Most recently, she was Head of Digital Editorial Capability for Fairfax Media, publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. In this role, she facilitated and co-produced the investigative podcast series ‘Phoebe’s Fall’, which won gold at the New York Radio Festival, along with a host of other awards.
Known for her early research and reporting about the transformative impacts of social media practice on journalism (from the clash of private and public spheres, to new patterns of audience engagement, and challenges to traditional modes of verification), Posetti has also been at the forefront of understanding and documenting converging Digital Age threats to investigative journalism, in particular journalistic source confidentiality.
Title and abstract
The New Frontline: Female Journalists at the Intersection of Converging Digital Age Threats
Three of the most urgent safety and security threats confronting Digital Age journalism are converging, and female journalists are at the epicentre of risk. These convergent threats can be identified as follows: gendered online harassment; orchestrated disinformation campaigns; and privacy erosion. In this paper/presentation, I will extrapolate and synthesise findings from a body of original research on these themes that I have produced for UNESCO (Posetti 2017; Posetti 2017a; Posetti 2018; Posetti & Storm 2019), the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford (Posetti, Simon and Shabbir 2019); and the NGO Blueprint for Free Speech (Posetti, Dreyfus and Colvin 2018) over the past five years as these risks have begun intersecting and overlapping. The risks to be examined range from pernicious, gendered online harassment to overt, targeted attacks that frequently involve threats of sexual violence. Increasingly, they also include digital security breaches from the exposure of identifying information (exacerbating offline safety threats and risking the exposure and targeting of confidential sources), to malicious misrepresentation using Artificial Intelligence technologies. The objective will be to demonstrate the impacts of these overlapping safety and security threats faced by female journalists working in digital contexts – risks that manifest both online and offline, and extend to the journalists’ sources and audiences. Additionally, I will suggest a range of recommendations for action by states, the news industry, academia and civil society organisations based on this analysis.
Early research highlighting the misogynistic nature of harassment experienced by women bloggers in the pre-social media era serves as a beacon for the rampant cyber-misogyny now experienced by women journalists in the age of ‘social journalism’ (Filipovic 2007; Seelhoff 2007; Citron 2009). The expectation that journalists be actively embedded on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to facilitate the direct audience engagement that is now integral to journalistic research, production and content dissemination (Posetti 2013) has placed female journalists on the frontline of a massive problem. In addition to threats of sexualised violence – including rape and murder – the ‘pile on’ effect (organic, organised, or robotic mass attacks against a person online) worsens the impacts of online harassment experienced by female journalists, a burden they increasingly share with their female audiences and sources.
Another hallmark of this online abuse of women media workers (and others producing verifiable information in the public interest across a range of digital platforms) is the use of disinformation tactics – lies are spread about their character or their work as a means of undermining their credibility, humiliating them, and seeking to chill their public commentary and reporting. In some instances, journalists have been targeted in acts of ‘astroturfing’ and ‘trolling’ – experienced as deliberate attempts to “mislead, misinform, befuddle, or endanger journalists” (Posetti 2013). In other cases, they face cyberattacks designed to reveal their sources, breach their privacy to expose them to risk, identify their sources, or access their unpublished data through phishing (King 2014), doxing , malware attacks, and identity spoofing . More recently, computational propaganda (Woolley & Howard 2017) has increased the risks for journalists dealing with ‘astroturfing’ and ‘trolling’. This involves the use of bots to disseminate well-targeted false information and propaganda messages on a scale designed to look like an organic movement. Frequently, these attacks have involved gendered elements and threats of sexual violence. Concurrently, AI technology is being leveraged to create ‘deepfake’ porn videos and other forms of content designed to discredit women journalists. A trend has also emerged involving the specific targeting of women journalists by state and corporate actors engaged in ‘disinformation wars’ deploying the tactics described above (Posetti 2018). Case studies to be cited in this paper/presentation (drawing on dozens of research interviews with relevant actors) include: The targeting of Independent Philippines news site Rappler.com and its largely female staff in a campaign of prolific online abuse that began in 2016 in connection with an ongoing state-sponsored disinformation campaign that has included digital security attacks on Rappler as well as threats of violence and sexual assault against its staff. Rappler’s CEO and Executive Editor Maria Ressa has become an international leader in the fightback against the problem (Posetti 2017a; Posetti, Simon & Shabbir 2019).
A wealthy family, accused of capturing key state enterprises and politicians in South Africa, hired UK Public Relations firm Bell Pottinger to devise an elaborate propaganda campaign. It spread its messages via a ‘fake news’ empire involving websites and a paid twitter army which targeted journalists, business people and politicians with abusive, hostile messages and photoshopped images, designed to humiliate and discredit. Prominent editor Ferial Haffajee (along with her Daily Maverick colleagues) was targeted in a campaign of online harassment during this period, which saw her image manipulated to create false impressions of her character, alongside deployment of the hashtag #presstitute (Posetti 2018; Posetti, Simon & Shabbir 2019 ).
he case of journalist Rana Ayyub elicited a call in 2018 from five United Nations special rapporteurs for the Indian government to provide protection, following the mass circulation of false information online designed to counter her critical reporting. The independent journalist was on the receiving end of disinformation about her on social media, including ‘deepfake’ videos , as well as direct rape and death threats (OHCHR 2018; Ayyub 2018). The UN experts cited the murder of Indian journalist, Gauri Lankesh, following death threats in September 2017 and called on India to act to protect Ayyub, stating: “We are highly concerned that the life of Rana Ayyub is at serious risk following these graphic and disturbing threats.” Similar threats were experienced by female journalists working at Indian digital news site The Quint in the context of disinformation connected to Hindu Nationalism and Modi populism.
Finnish investigative journalist, Jessikka Aro, is the ongoing target of ‘troll factories’ in a campaign that began in 2014. She has experienced disinformation attacks, along with digital safety threats including spoofing and doxing: “…propagandists started to spread fake information about me in Russian information spaces. I was framed as some kind of foreign agent or foreign spy. My contact information was put online along with that disinformation,” she told the BBC (BBC Trending 2017).
Selected publications
- Posetti, J (2017) Protecting Journalism Sources in the Digital Age (Paris: UNESCO)
- Posetti, J (2017) Fighting Back Against Prolific Online Harassment: Maria Ressa in UNESCO’s An Attack on One is an Attack on All (Paris: UNESCO)
- Posetti J & Ireton C (2018) Journalism ‘Fake News’ and Disinformation (Paris: UNESCO)
- Posetti, J et al (2019) Perugia Principles for Journalists Working With Whistleblowers in the Digital Age
- Posetti J, Simon F, Shabbir, N (2019) Lessons in Innovation: How International Newsrooms Combat Disinformation Through Mission-Driven Journalism, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford.