By Umamah Bakharia

Amnesty International South Africa is accusing Twitter of not doing enough to protect female users from online violence and abuse.

After interviewing a diverse group of women, Amnesty’s 2021 Twitter scorecard released on Tuesday found that women experience a higher risk of online abuse on this platform.

Amongst these women was, journalist, Carin Moore, former DA MP, Phumzile van Damme and fitness fanatic, Rachel Kholisi.

Rachel Kolisi, wife of popular South Africa’s Rugby captian Siya Kolisi has been a target of abuse by Twitter users.

The main findings were that Twitter has done very little to combat the abuse on its platform, with all the participants saying that even though they experienced online violence and abuse on Twitter, nothing was done about it.

Twitter in South Africa has approximately 9.3 million users in South Africa, which increases the spread of disinformation, defamation and abusive tendencies by users.

Amnesty International South Africa says Twitter is falling short in the protection of women, Radio Islam spoke to Amnesty International SA spokesperson Genevieve Quintal.

Amnesty International SA spokesperson Genevieve Quintal.

Even though Quintal says: “Twitter has made some progress with the [launch] of some awareness campaigns that have [expanded] the scope of their hateful conduct policy and improved their reporting mechanisms and security features.”

Amnesty International SA is asking for more transparency from Twitter, how is their work moderated & who’s keeping an eye on this tweets etc.