The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF virtual intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> ANITA GURUMURTHY: Welcome, everyone. I am Anita Gurumurthy. I welcome you all to the session that we are co-organizing with the Office of the U.N. And the session is titled the women's right to online participation: Promise or pipe dream? We all live in a time of public sphere what this means is justice platforms have enabled novel forms of speech and expression and they have engendered new practices of speech regulation. In this brand-new speech paradigm, liberal legal philosophy and jurisprudence seem to fall short. They're inadequate, coordinated troll attacks and gender and women minorities do not operate like traditional silencing mechanisms and create a crisis on freedom, taking away the right to participation. As the infrastructures of speech change social interaction, we are faced with a task of gendering the right to free expression all over again. That's why we are here today. And it's our belief that a dialogue is a starting point for this process. Judit Arenas, senior adviser Office of the U.N. of Freedom of Expression will be introducing the panelists but before I hand over, I wanted to reiterate the questions we came to understand. How can states design liability frameworks to achieve the fine balance between platform responsibility for redress against sexist hate online and preventing private censorship of online speech. And finally, what do we need to do to promote synergies between national policy, platform self-governance, and community standards and a new regulatory approach to preserve freedoms and address harms. And what is the role in the context of the IGF of the multilateral system and working towards this synergy. Over to you, Judit. And welcome, everybody.
>> JUDIT ARENAS: Thank you very much. And once again extending our warm welcome from the Americas to you joining from different parts of the world. I'm really delighted that we are able to partner with civil society and the extremely important session and this very important issue about women's right to online participation. On behalf, I would like to welcome everyone and as Anita mentioned emphasize that we see this very much strongly as part of a process. This is we hope to be able to reconvene and continue the track process with the internet governance forum and hope that this is only the beginning of you know, of a longer-term process. On behalf of Irene, she did ask me to send a few words. She was going to send a recorded message, but we had technical problems. She wanted me to emphasize that for first time in 27 years this mandate is held by a woman. For 27 years, the second report at the office has produced which was very much informed by the very thoughtful, insightful, and detailed inputs that many online provided was actually devoted exclusively to the challenges faced by women and gender, non-conforming people, and exercising their freedom of opinion and expression. The report in itself is only the beginning of a process. This internet session is an ongoing one, and we have to continue to work with you to help figure out what are the specific recommendations that need to be made and need to be implemented by member states, by company, by media, by civil society. So that we can frankly end what is an unlawful interference with women's freedom of opinion and expression. But more than anything that we are able to actually create an enabling environment for women to per size their agent and I have full access to information and ideas both on and offline.
This, Irene herself has said that women's voices are suppressed, controlled, or punished by law, policy, and discriminatory practices and by social attitude, cultural norm, and values. Sexism and misogyny which are dominant factors have been heightened rise of fundamental forces around the world. And in light of the dominant role of the internet world, it's particularly important that attention be paid to this evolving space and online and to the impact of digital technology on the challenges that women face both physically and online spaces. And I think it is particularly in this context where we know that there a gender digital divide, where we know we have gender data gaps and other barriers that frankly stop women from accessing their full right to information, that we figure out how we overcome these multiple divides. So in this con next billion this conversation could not be more timely. It's a fantastic conversation that we really allow us to be able to fully engage with all of you and different part participants and different means of experience and we're very, very grateful that you've allowed Irene to share these comments via someone who is not a speaker but those were written by her so, they are her own words. I hope that sets an overall scheme. And I will put in the chat a link to the records so if anyone is interested, you can access and see the final outcome. We are limited in the U.N. reports with a page limit, but the contributions are available online. So for those that I know did send in detailed contributions, rest assured that they were fully integrated.
With this, we want to now move into what I think is the most exciting part of our conversation today. And we need to figure out the what is next and how do we draw upon all the different pieces that we should be taking into account. And really enriching it from a variety of government, inter-governmental, private sector, civil society perspectives where we have a fantastic panel that I hope will be able to interact. We also have all of you who are in-person and also joining us virtually. Please feel free to use the chat function so that you can let us know if you have comments. The way that we're going to run this, we're going to have scene setters and enable our participants to really lay out some of the key issues in what I hope will be an interactive conversation. And really from there, be able to move into a more broader discussion from all of you.
First of all, I am delighted to be able to welcome the Mexican foreign ministry. We are particularly grateful that you're jumping in after some other ambassador is representing Mexico and the U.N. security council. And was pulled in at the last moment to participate in the security council session. So we are grateful that you are obviously a fantastic person to have and delighted that you're able to share some of the governmental perspectives. So perhaps we could go to you first. To really as a country that has expressed a feminist foreign policy, we would love to hear your takes on what could be done.
>> ELVIRA GA RCIA: We appreciate the invitation of the organizers. The special reporter of the protection of the right of freedom and opinion and expression offered in their last report a very valuable analysis of the challenges faced by all women and girls in online and offline spaces. And made relevant recommendations to create an enabling environment and a safe digital space for all women and girls to enjoy the freedom of opinion and expression on equal footing.
As you may know, since 2020, Mexico adopted a feminist foreign policy which aims to promote a gender equality of all women and girls and in our bilateral and regional relations in. The particular and very relevant issue of Freedom of Expression and technology, the participation of women and girls must be overcome the gaps that the digital world imposes including gender, digital divide.
The platforms have provided a space for hasn't vim, but they have also been shown to perpetrate gender power structures, gender stereotypes. Mexico recognizes the digital world and the development of new technologies as key catalysts for economic development and investment. With consequent benefits for employment and social welfare by reducing obstacles to participation including the participation of women in the economic sphere and achieving the economic autonomy.
This is the reason why it is of utmost importance to continue fighting for gender equality and women and girls, human rights and to adopt scientific strategies, technology, and innovation for empowerment and reduce inequalities including the gender divide. The digital world has challenges and in the case of women and girl, it is not just about access. Although we recognize that the ability to have meaningful internet access has a direct impact on the exercise of the right to Freedom of Expression and opinion among other rights.
We know that women in all the diversity also face challenges on availability affordability, cultural discrimination, and norms, capacity and skills, availability of relevant content, and participation in decision-making roles on the internet or in the technology sector. Among other barriers. Women and girls including those in vulnerable situations should be able to enjoy access to information relevant to them. Including diversity and languages, interests, content, and context.
Multiple forms of discrimination and violences against women and girls online such as cyberstalking, cyberbullying, harassment, or misogynistic speech limits their full recognition of women's human rights including Freedom of Expression. Of course, we must also provide women and girls with a digital world free of violence to become a tool for the empowerment.
One important achievement in Mexico was the adoption of the Olympia. Which punishes the dissemination of intimate and sexual content without the consent of the person involved. Women and journalists not only face those risks suffered by male peers when they investigate and report human rights violations or political crisis situations, but women journalists have to address gender-based attacks which analyzed with the intersection of identities and social economic factors and conditions increase their level and create additional obstacles in the exercise of the right to Freedom of Expression.
On the other hand, gender stereotypes continue to exclude many women from participation in public debate and by their free expression. Shows that the media considers women's opinion less important and that they expect women to fit into stereotype roles and sexualized images of them. This situation results in the unequal power relations between men and women in the media world. This is contrary to what is established in Beijing platform for action in the sphere of gender and media. For those reason, we stress the term gender justice. In the report presented, there is an urgent need for transformative changes and encompassing equity. And equality to break the structural and systemic barriers holding women back.
One of Mexico's priorities is leave no one behind. Having a feminist frame policy will enable us to place women and girls at the center of the country's welfare policies, both at the national and international levels. In the case of Freedom of Expression, we have the responsibility to address factors that increase the likelihood of gender-based violence and harassment and multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination against all women and girls in media. It is especially relevant to involve more women and girls in S.T.E.M. careers and media. Their participation in these spaces promotes the elimination of gender stereotypes and inspires other women and girls to participate in these areas that have traditionally been underrepresented. It is important to invest in the development of leadership skills in all women and girls.
Under the principles of Mexico's feminist and foreign policy, we will continue to promote inclusion of the gender perspective and all global issues. Division of women and girls must be considered to solve all the challenges we face as humanity. Mexico is away of the fact that it's feminist foreign policy will contribute significantly to the country's national development. Thank you very much.
>> JUDIT ARENAS: Thank you very much. That's a fantastic overview, inspirational one as well to see the policy commitments so thank you very much more flagging the Olympia law which we know has been instrumental and the model law for many other countries.
One of the things that emerged in the report is the issue of the dampening, the silencing effect that this climate of online and offline violence against women can have. In fact, I would like to invite everyone to share this link. We are currently highlighting the cases of 16 -- of 10 journalists around the world where their voices have been silenced and they have received more gender attacks simply for the fact that they're going about doing their journalistic work. In Brazil, you have been documenting some of the specific examples, the fact that Freedom of Expression and opinion when limited can have a long-term negative impact on hampering women in political life and women journalists. Would you be able to share a little bit of that context of what your research has identified?
>> MARIANA VA L ENTE: Sure. We really appreciate the report. It aids us immensely and it's historical because -- and this is what I want to speak about, seeing Freedom of Expression and women's rights is only serving equality in the online environment. And this is what we're seeing in our empirical research looking at the social media of politicians in Brazil during electoral periods and of journalists. In the 2020 election, we monitored over 100 profiles of women candidates. We were also monitoring male candidates to compare. And we were able to see a striking difference not only in the numbers of the offenses and affects that these women were getting on social media but also on the sorts of affects. The kind of things that women get online. Specifically at the social media of women, from all the messages they got, around 10% in twitter and on YouTube of all those messages, they contained offensive terms. Sometimes they were not offensive, but they contained offensive terms. And when the offenses or attacks or hate, they did not always violate social media policies. Because sometimes they didn't get to the threshold of really violating the policies, so they were kept online. And not because they don't violate policies that they're harmful. Especially when considered in bulk. So one of the things we were doing was speaking to the candidates and seeing the effect that it had on them. And this was really a striking experience. How it gets worse when we're speaking of Black women, trans women, these women were getting much more slurs than the other women. And then speaking of how offenses were different when we're speaking of women or men, it was pretty clear that men also get offenses. But most of these offenses, attacks, or slurs, they're mostly related to their work, either in office or their experience while when we look at what women were getting, they were getting related to appearance or to their role in their families. So for example, either as mothers or as wives or to their sexual lives. And that was strikingly different.
Another thing that I think is important is that we've been looking to research showing that fear of such attacks is one of the reasons why many women fear running to politics. So what I wanted to say is that this has real effects in participation. And in changing policies around women's right, not only online but everywhere. And because online campaigns are so important for women, in the case of Brazil, women get much less money for the campaign than their male counterparts so being safe online, being able to express themselves online is really important. And we are now doing a similar research looking at the profiles of journalists and we're comparing male and female journalists. What we have seen so far is female journalists on average get twice as much as the number of attacks that male journalists get. And this shows how, it is really difficult to be a journalist in Brazil. But it's much more difficult being a woman. It's really massive. The kind of things that they get, just being online and just doing their work. I think one of the things that we are going to discuss further is that we have a lack of social and legal acknowledgment of misogyny. That's almost everywhere in the world. That's definitely the case in Brazil. And that makes it so much harder to encompass the problem, describe the problem, make it visible. To make it visible to the government, to laws, to social media platforms, to society at large. This is something that's largely not acknowledged. And I think that's the first thing that we should be talking about.
>> JUDIT ARENAS: Thank you so much. That's actually a very -- the data points themselves are actually, they shouldn't be surprising because we hear people talk about them so much but yet they are because they're shockingly high. And at a time when we feel we're making progress, and moving at different dimensions, it seems as if we still, well, emphasize the fact that we actually have a huge amount of work that we need to focus on and we need to try to prioritize.
I would like to move on to Cindy because one of the, you know, Facebook, I should know whether it's META OR MATA, but I hope you correct us this a moment and let us know the new official words. But technology platform, during the pandemic, we have seen how they have become instrumental in terms of providing the ability to connect. We have also heard when there's internet shortages how people can have huge impacts on livelihoods and in terms of connectivity. So I know you've been doing really interesting work in terms of figuring out how to tackle some of the issues.
>> CINDY SOUTHWORTH: The parent company is known as META, which as much as we're having our moments, it's helpful for me because I'm the Global Head of women's safety which means I get to work on safety features and work with engineers across the company from what's app to Facebook date, Instagram, I get toking to be involved in the topics so. I used to say that I was head of women's for Facebook, people thought it was Facebook blue and not all the other platforms and technologies.
Just a little bit about me and then I'm going to jump into the question. I worked in the nonprofit world, and I founded a technology project called the safety net tech project at the U.S. national network to end domestic violence. My first slide deck talked about brief and I safety with net scape if that ages me a little bit. And one thing I was looking at there is cyber violence and what I expected that was the offline violence that we had been seeing for hundreds, thousands of years, my assumption was that it was going to start moving into tech spaces. And whether that be the early versions of the internet, with GPS tracking of people via cars and phones and all of those predictions played out. And I was able to see what was happening inside trying to tackle the complex issues. So when this position opened up last summer, I was happy to join the company to try to see what I can do to help use this platform to amplify non-profit voices so we can do the critical social change work to get at the foundation of misogyny. And then what I can do with all of my colleagues to make sure we're doing a better job of taking down harmful content, making sure that online spaces are safe for all user, not just the privileged few. We know that Freedom of Expression if it's truly going to be realized has to be freedom for all voice, women, marginalized, transwomen, it can't just be western white males. We have to make sure that the safety mechanisms that we have and that's a mix of our policies as a couple mentioned, the community standards which we enhanced just in October and added more protections for activists and journalist, more protections against sexual harassments and more against brigading and mass harassments. And we look at tools and one of things that I'm excited about is the detection is getting better. So ideally, our computers will identify hate speech before anybody sees and it reports it to us. So for example, on Facebook, 96.5% of hate speech is removed by the computer before someone reports it. On Instagram, it's 93.8% is caught by detection. Because of our scale, with so many users, that's still not enough. Even 1% or half a per September is going to mean content is staying up that has 20 come down. So we are striving to increase the numbers. And we are working on other tools to get at some of the nuances. Sometimes things don't hit the threshold the hack we run into is we have very comprehensive slur list in every language that our nonprofit partners help us develop to stay current with languages but it's hard to catch something that is really contextized. So I was talking to a woman swimmer. She's amazing. And she talked about how often she gets comments talking about how she should be in the kitchen. And our algorithms are not going to pick up on kitchen as a slur or hate speech but in her case it is. So that's where some of the tools we created like hidden words, filter, keyword filtering, people can put in words or emojis. Maybe you want to redecorate your kitchen and that's a separate issue and probably on the personal page. So it's a balance of how can we work with policy, fools, and partner, we work with over 508 nonprofits around the world. And then another tool that we just announced that I think matches what we were talking about with the Mexico image abuse law is just last week, we announced a partnership with the UK revenge porn help line, stop res it's run by the NGO. We helped fund and build with it our engineers but allows people to have hash intimate images on their device, so they never share the images or videos with anyone. It doesn't go to a nonprofit, doesn't come to us. The only thing are the hashes which say string of letters and numbers which can't be reversed, and Facebook and Instagram will prevent the same hash from the matching image from showing up on the platforms. And we're hoping, it's set up so that there's a central clearinghouse and we're talks with other tech companies so hopefully many to us will be receiving the hashes and preventing the images from being shared. It does not stop the root of the problem. And we're, one of my goals for 2022 is to reengage with a bunch of nonprofit friends around the world that work on engaging men to interrupt misogyny because until we get at the root of this, I would like for it never to occur to someone to share an intimate image without concept. But in the meantime, I'm going to address it from an engineering, policy, enforcement and we know we don't always get it right. And we have more work to do. So I'm thrilled to be part of the conversation today. Thank you
>> JUDIT ARENAS: Thank you so much. That was encouraging in terms of laying out and looking forwards to 2022. I say events in 2021 are helping shape our New Year's resolutions so I hope everyone took note of figuring out where they can implement that vision that you shared in their own spaces and look forward to discussing this. I want to turn to you next. Because I think part of what we have is we need to be looking at the power of multilateralism. The powerful of governmental organizations and the role that organizations and particularly regional ones like the council of Europe can do. In terms of helping, in terms of capturing the online learnings and taking them out to national governments, so other to you. Because you have been doing fantastic work., but we wanted to hear from.
>> Thank you very much and thank you to the organizers. It's a pleasure to be talking here today. Let me introduce myself. The monitoring mechanism at the council of convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. Violence against women online has enormous impact on women and girls online. And 2 Freedom of Expression. Yes, the accessibility of the internet and wide use of ICTs for many women, it's connected them, empowered them, all of us, it helped us to get through the pandemic. But there's a dark side of the internet which we will be talking about today, the violence against women perpetrated online or through the use of technologies. And we can no longer ignore the fact that as the internet grow, so does the violence against women and girls. As the other speakers mentioned, this is a continuum of the violence that women and girls experience every day on the street, at workplace, at home. And it is being suppressed and amplified in the online world. But the root cause of violences is the same, it's gender stereotypes, stereotypes about male and female gender roles in society, misogyny, and inferiority to men. Women are disproportionately affected by online violence. Yes, men are targeted by online criticism, but it has such a huge silencing effects on girls. And limits their profession. And more and more normalized. So what is emerging is much more needs to be done by space. By preventing this from happen, by protecting and supporting the women and girls being victimized by it. And holding the perpetrators accountability. And this is where we believe the convention offers huge potential. And I would like to talk about our general recommendation on the violence against women.
Uniqueness of this recommendation comes from the fact that for the first time, legal instrument provides practical guidance to state parties of international convention on how to implement the provisions in the context of the digital divide. So general recommendation first, we seek definitions of key terms and concepts regarding the digital manifestations of violence against women. The various forms it may take. And most importantly, we provided foundations to state parties in line with all of the convention. Prevention, protection, prosecution, and policies. And what I would like to say that was and is already applicable to online violence. It has provisions that are directly related to digital space. For example, stalking. Which in the digital sphere can take the form of surveying, spying, or contacting the victim repeatedly on their social media accounts, or hack their devices, gain access to accounts, or installing spy ware or conversation apps on their device, even on the internet of thing, the smart phone devices are being used to intimidate and control women. Sexual harassment, as we know, this can take m different forms. Image-based sexual abuse which is known as revenge porn. These new words that appeared in our vocabulary, screen shot, and up skirting, and even sexualized bullying. And also, of course, psychological violence which has been covered. And I think we can all agree that all forms of online violence have a huge impact on the sigh cooling of the victims.
So and the general recommendation offers an approach covering all of the pillars. And the recommendations address the parties, but it also provides the accommodations on how to engage the private sector. Media, in the policies combating violence against women and girls. For example, to give example from the recommendations. On the prevention, for example, education is the step towards eradicating all sorts of gender-based violence in society. And this means and society but especially among women and girls to education. Providing mandatory to all relevant professionals because we notice that many of the professionals, especially law enforcement professional, judiciary, science, they lack the knowledge and decision combat this kind of violence. And this means that campaigns, girls and boy, all levels, and all actors of society on this particular form of violence against women. Of course, media has undeniable role in shaping public perceptions in society. So the recommendation encourages the parties to incentivize organizations and journalist unions to abandon the (?) when reporting on the violence against women issues. And to increase the number of women who work in the media sector. We all know that media and journalism at large is male-dominated sector.
Also the recommendations also address services which means they have to be acceptable. To overcome these issues, the recommendation calm states to develop and disseminate and support services to victims. Create accessible content mechanisms, preferably through online platforms within the law enforcement forces or the authorities. Which also means we should create the NGOs or support services that provide protection to victims with the technical knowledge and skills because we have been hearing cases of victims having tracking device on phones, for example, and they seek shelter in a shelter that should be confidential. But because of this tracking device and because nobody is able to detect them, this device makes their location known to perpetrators. And this is something that is putting strain on the limited human and finance resources of protection services.
Also as I mentioned and I think it's very important, the general recommendation addresses the roles of the main non-state actors which are the internet theories which include the ICPS, Meg platform, software developers. So states should encourage actors to establish mechanisms to provide robust moderation of content that goes against the principle. And either to removal of account of the perpetrator altogether or the content. Or information, reporting recommendations should be available and all the victims in languages that are suitable to the user base.
Also again, law enforcement and authorities, they need a lot of (?) in this area. They lack the technical knowledge and resources to address this. It's necessary that the state provide this kind of financial resources to their law enforcement forces.
This can be specialists’ units or like building activities to already working on violence against women cases and also securing electronic evidence is very important. And very tricky issue. This is another thing that the capabilities should be developed within the law enforcement. And also more often than not, violence against women has an international factor. Which means that multilateral coordination, cooperation is very important in this area. So the general recommendation promotes international cooperation, held by the service providers, such as subscriber information or the IP addresses to find perpetrators. And second, to use effectively the communication channels that already formal such as Interpol or bilateral exchanges to communicate with each other. And the recommendations also encourages the responsibility of the ICT sector and suggests that the sectors should adhere to strict standards in content moderation. And they should work with law enforcement when it comes to sharing the identifying information, the IP address of given perpetrator or electronic evidence that might serve to support the case of the victim. And most importantly, the recommendations stresses that all victims of violence against women perpetrated in the digital sphere should have access to criminal justice systems.
So I mentioned the policy, and the final piece is the coordinated policies. So the recommendation requires first and foremost the inclusion into all national strategy, action plans against violence against women of all state parties as well as any research and survey in this domain. Establishment of effective public and private partnerships involving all relevant factors which are the private enterprise and I.T. sectors, NGO and civil society organizations, national human rights institutions.
So we try to show how to engage technology companies, software designers, I.T. professionals and platforms in their efforts with dimension of violence against women. For example, online source providers can be a part of the solution by offering mechanisms for users to report harmful content. And information on how to use these mechanisms should be equally transparent and accessible. And ICT sector should encourage to adopt human rights-based approach in all stages of the commercial activities which starts from product design.
And given the increase and this is also very important and disturbing issue, given the increase of online sexual violence and we see it more and more in our country monitoring activities, recorded violence, sexual acts, these are being more and more visible and being shared against the consent of the victim. Sometimes the victim doesn't give consent to the act itself. Sometimes the victim gives consent to the act but not the violent nature or shame. And there are corporations making profit out of showing this privacy violating content. And we are calling the state parties to address this problem by minimizing the production and distribution of such content when it's necessary.
And right now, on our agenda, violence against women is quite important. So we launched the recommendation, but we also published recently a study on the synergies on cybercrime. So how the two can strengthen each other. On one hand, we have the transformation that provides forensic tool, international mechanisms and on the other hand, we have standard connection that criminalizes certain forms of violence against women. And our study seeks to bring these two together and show how can they be used in the combat against violence against women.
>> JUDIT ARENAS: Thank you very much. Thank you so, so much. And different ideas and you know, I was writing collaboration down as you started talking about the need to have private/public partnerships. I think there's been a huge set of ideas and thoughts. And I know my mind is reeling. I want to make sure if people want to ask a question, this is an open session, it is an open forum to be able to participate in debate. So sometimes getting hit on and off mute is hard, but if you want to ask a question, please unmute yourself. I am looking at the bullet on the. If you're not able to, just please put a message in the chat, raise your hand function, and we will sort out the technology or put it into in the chat. But to keep us going, I know there is much reflection and I think the insights that I've taken down are huge. From a procedural point of view, I want to reassure everyone that there is a write-up. If you were scribbling down trying to capture the thought, other people have been helping us with capturing the ideas as well. But I think the discussion has been very action very exciting. I am delighted that we did not focus on content moderation that all of you came up with the need for different stakeholders to be engage. And one of the observations is that I have is that we've actually managed to absorb a lot more of this, what is the journey trajectory of the challenge. If anything, the breadth of the challenge that we have is huge because we're talking from shifting cultural norms, issues of dealing with misogyny to dealing with issues around data collection and figuring out how do we in this rapidly changing environment of technology moving so quickly, you mentioned yourself the need for us to actually be training, you know, police officers, prosecutors don't understand technology. And then that critical point about how to we actually nail down the product keys the product assigned piece. And Cindy, thank you so much for sharing those insights about the work that you're doing. And in terms of -- I'm very encouraged to know that we have someone like you that's actually looking across the range of products and really taking a holistic approach.
So what I would like to do is give each of the speakers who want to take the floor an opportunity to come back and help us kind of capture, if there's anything that you thought was particularly helpful, if you want to cover what anyone else has said. And IGF is a unique as a multistakeholder forum, maybe work my way backwards and go back to you. And just say again from the multistakeholder perspective, what do you think are the one or two things we should be focusing on? Where should we need to be putting our efforts on as we think through resolutions for next year?
>> Thank you. I guess what I was going to say what you said to Cindy, I really appreciate that there's no one looking to -- I think one of the problems, I'm going the get to the multistakeholder problem, one problem that we see is these issues of women's participation online, they're really embedded in all the problems that we're facing in the online environment. And it's so common that people treat them separately. As if Jenn-based violence is like a separate box that we need to tackle separately. And election, it's very important to task forces in electoral courts or companies themselves that they think of this dimension of misogyny, gender-based violence, gender equality online and not just elections. But journalism and the problem of journalism in the public sphere today, that's another issue where the subjects should be discussed. And feminist organization, CIL society organizations that deal with the issues or women's rights issues, they should be at the table. Right? And these different places with these different stakeholders. I guess I'll close there because I know we have just a little time.
>> JUDIT ARENAS: Thank you so much. Cindy, your reflections and how do we, from the different -- I should say my official job is in the private sector. So I understand the need for bridging. But I find very often, that how to work better with the private sector than the truly multistakeholder way is not truly understood. So give us your top wishes for engagement.
>> CINDY SOUTHWORTH: One of my fave parts of my current job is working on projects that I inspired in my nonprofit life. And there are features within messenger and restrict within Instagram that came from the violence against women community saying it's not always safe for a user to block the ex-partner. They may need to keep an eye on activities to know if they need to leave town or shelter. And those features came from nonprofit partnership with the tech companies saying here's a use case you've never thought of because it's not as simple as block somebody who’s dangerous to you. You may have to deal with exchanging the children over the weekend for visitation and all of those types of things. So one of the things that I'm really proud of is that we have very broad relationships. And we've just launched a couple of months ago a global women's safety expert advisory group. And that's going to be an expanding group. And we're rotating people in and out, so we get to hear from most voices. But I can bring things to them before they're fully baked and show a couple of different approaches that we're considering with a product feature or a policy. And get really critical feedback. People are not warm and fuzzy. They tell us if they think we're blowing it. But it's nice to have the group. In addition to the 850 global safety partners that we talk to all the time on lots of issues. So I just would say, please one of the core tenants, we need to hear from people about what we're missing, where the gaps are. Please feel free to reach out directly, through you. I'll put my email in the chat box.
>> JUDIT ARENAS: Thank you so much, Cindy. Elif, you checked detailed so many ideas but your thoughts on multistakeholderism and how do we leverage that to tackle this challenge that we have online and offline safe spaces for women?
>> Yes. As you said, it's such a top and I could go on forever. But just from the top of my head, I got to say, states should cooperate more with independent regulatory authorities and the media and access separately if there are journalistic union process, fissional unions to stick together and discuss what can be done about this. And other manner, in other ways, of course, it's not a multi-ecosystem to recall approach but the hiring of maybe feminist cybersecurity experts in I.T. sector, I think that would really enable to tackle the issue from the perspective.
I could go on. To involve the ICT sector and companies and NGOs in the education, I think it's very, very important because it all goes back to the historical groups violence against women. And we start teaching society about digital literacy and gender roles in general. And what to share, what not share, what is consent. I think it's very important that the ICT companies become a part of the discussion from early on. And they support in this area.
>> JUDIT ARENAS: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. I don't want to put you on the spot because I know that you are a very graceful, you did a fantastic role in jumping in with the security council agenda change. But if you want to say something by all mean, I think you gave a very good overview of everything that is happening. And I know we are at two minutes. So I want to just thank everyone, thank everyone on behalf, emphasize that we're in the middle of a process. We have done a report but that was just to get thoughts out there. Would love to continue to be involved and I'll share my email and our new website which actually has a specific space where we want to gather and hear more information. And Anita, over to you. And with huge thanks and appreciation to everyone at I.T. for change.
>> ANITA GURUMURTHY: Thank you so much. I think people have taken time to be here with us. What I want to take away is what we started off with, reaffirming the fact that we all owe to it the great deliberations and platform for action and the various women's human rights instruments which talks about full agency for women and nothing shorter. Just as we were beginning to think that here are my communities of interest, here is a global citizenship that I'm going to really enjoy, at that point, something happened. And then the structures of the internet in some way turned against women in the very reason it has given them voice and agency. So this is like a doubled-edged sword. And here we are to reaffirm some of the principles. One is about gender justice and breaking structural and systemic barriers which I think we have to transpose online. We have to look at intersectional locations. Women and lit in political life, journalists. We will have to look at making the problem visible because of the lack of social acknowledgment. We really have to acknowledge the international character of the problem because entire net is a global public good. And the points about baking in human rights at all stages, baking in women's rights at all stages of product development. These are some of the thoughts I take away. And I wanted to thank everybody for having joined us today. We will prepare a report and circulate it. Thank you very much to the Office of the special Rapporteur and others who joined us.
>> JUDIT ARENAS: Thank you very much, everyone.