Facebook ranks worst for online harassment, according to a global activist survey
Global Witness and many of the activists it surveyed are calling on Meta and its peers to do more to address harassment and misinformation on their platforms. Left to fester, they fear that online attacks could fuel real-world risks to activists. Around 75 percent of people surveyed said they believed that online abuse they experienced corresponded to offline harm.
'Those stats really stayed with me. They were so much higher than we expected them to be,' Ava Lee, campaign strategy lead on digital threats at Global Witness, tells The Verge. That's despite expecting a gloomy outcome based on prior anecdotal accounts. 'It has kind of long been known that the experience of climate activists and environmental defenders online is pretty awful,' Lee says.
Left to fester, they fear that online attacks could fuel real-world risks
Global Witness surveyed more than 200 people between November 2024 and March of this year that it was able to reach through the same networks it taps when documenting the killings of land and environmental defenders. It found Meta-owned platforms to be 'the most toxic.' Around 62 percent of participants said they encountered abuse on Facebook, 36 percent on WhatsApp, and 26 percent on Instagram.
That probably reflects how popular Meta's platforms are around the world. Facebook has more than 3 billion active monthly users, more than a third of the global population. But Meta also abandoned its third-party fact-checking program in January, which critics warned could lead to more hate speech and disinformation. Meta moved to a crowdsourced approach to content moderation similar to X, where 37 percent of survey participants reported experiencing abuse.
In May, Meta reported a 'small increase in the prevalence of bullying and harassment content' on Facebook as well as 'a small increase in the prevalence of violent and graphic content' during the first quarter of 2025.
'That's sort of the irony as well, of them moving towards this kind of free speech model, which actually we're seeing that it's silencing certain voices,' says Hannah Sharpe, a senior campaigner at Global Witness.
Fatrisia Ain leads a local collective of women in Sulawesi, Indonesia, where she says palm oil companies have seized farmers' lands and contaminated a river local villagers used to be able to rely on for drinking water. Posts on Facebook have accused her of being a communist, a dangerous allegation in her country, she tells The Verge.
The practice of 'red-tagging' — labeling any dissident voices as communists — has been used to target and criminalize activists in Southeast Asia. In one high-profile case, a prominent environmental activist in Indonesia was jailed under 'anti-communism' laws after opposing a new gold mine.
Ain says she's asked Facebook to take down several posts attacking her, without success. 'They said it's not dangerous, so they can't take it down. It is dangerous. I hope that Meta would understand, in Indonesia, it's dangerous,' Ain says.
Other posts have accused Ain of trying to defraud farmers and of having an affair with a married man, which she sees as attempts to discredit her that could wind up exposing her to more threats in the real world — which has already been hostile to her activism. 'Women who are being the defenders for my own community are more vulnerable than men … more people harass you with so many things,' she says.
Nearly two-thirds of people who responded to the Global Witness survey said that they have feared for their safety, including Ain. She's been physically targeted at protests against palm oil companies accused of failing to pay farmers, she tells The Verge. During a protest outside of a government office, men grabbed her butt and chest, she says. Now, when she leads protests, older women activists surround her to protect her as a security measure.
In the Global Witness survey, nearly a quarter of respondents said they'd been attacked on the basis of their sex. 'There's evidence of the way that women and women of color in particular in politics experience just vast amounts more hate than any other group,' Lee says. 'Again, we're seeing that play out when it comes to defenders … and the threats of sexual violence, and the impact that that is having on the mental health of lots of these defenders and their ability to feel safe.'
'We encourage people to use tools available on our platforms to help protect against bullying and harassment,' Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton said in an email to The Verge, adding that the company is reviewing Facebook posts that targeted Ain. Meta also pointed to its 'Hidden Words' feature that allows you to filter offensive direct messages and comments on your posts and its 'Limits' feature that hides comments on your posts from users that don't follow you.
Other companies mentioned in the report, including Google, TikTok, and X, did not provide on-the-record responses to inquiries from The Verge. Nor did a palm oil company Ain says has been operating on local farmers' land without paying them, as they're supposed to do under a mandated profit-sharing scheme.
Global Witness says there are concrete steps social media companies can take to address harassment on their platforms. That includes dedicating more resources to their content moderation systems, regularly reviewing these systems, and inviting public input on the process. Activists surveyed also reported that they think algorithms that boost polarizing content and the proliferation of bots on platforms make the problem worse.
'There are a number of choices that platforms could make,' Lee says. 'Resourcing is a choice, and they could be putting more money into really good content moderation and really good trust and safety [initiatives] to improve things.'
Global Witness plans to put out its next report on the killings of land and environmental defenders in September. Its last such report found that at least 196 people were killed in 2023.
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Shortly afterward, the FBI informed him that there was a bomb in his house, Coughenour said. "What kind of people do these things?" he said during the forum. "It's just so disgusting and it's really unspeakable that people will do these things." Coughenour said that through his decades as a federal judge, he repeatedly heard jurists in other countries discuss how admired the U.S. judiciary was. But he said it's "stunning to me how much damage has been done to the reputation of our judiciary, because some political actors think they can gain some advantage by attacking the independence of the judiciary and threatening the rule of law." Coughenour issued a call for lawyers and fellow judges to speak out against the attacks on the judiciary and say "not in this country and not on our watch." The attacks appear to go beyond threats and harassment and also seek to inflict professional punishments on the judges. McConnell said he was the subject of judicial misconduct complaints filed by America First Legal, a conservative organization that was run by Stephen Miller, and two members of Congress. Miller now serves as White House deputy chief of staff. Both McConnell and Coughenour are overseeing cases that challenge policies implemented by the second Trump administration. Coughenour in February issued a preliminary injunction blocking Mr. Trump's plan to end birthright citizenship and McConnell in March blocked the White House's freeze on federal funding. The Justice Department appealed both decisions and legal proceedings are ongoing. Threats to federal judges have steadily risen over the last six years, according to the Marshals. A vulnerability management program run by the federal judiciary that was established after the death of Salas' son provided services to more than 1,700 judges, 114 retired judges and 235 family members, according to the Judicial Conference's annual report released in March. In 2022, after the leak of a draft Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a California man armed with a gun, knife and various tools was arrested outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh's Maryland home. The man was charged with attempted murder and pleaded not guilty. Salas told CBS News that it's not just federal judges who are targeted — state judges are now being pizza-doxxed, including those in Florida and Colorado. Colorado Chief Justice Monica Marquez has "gotten so many pizzas she's stopped counting," said Salas. Marquez cast a deciding vote in a 4-3 decision by Colorado's Supreme Court in December 2023 to disqualify then-candidate Trump from the Colorado ballot before the 2024 election. The court found that Mr. Trump was ineligible for the presidency under the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment, a decision that was ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court. Marquez spoke about the toll of that vote in November 2024, which she knew could be the most consequential of her career. She described how she was late for the court's conference that day because "I was in my chambers bathroom vomiting from the stress. I knew exactly what was on the line." In Florida, two state judges were targeted with pizzas, some also in the name of Salas' son. A 49-year-old man, Jonathan Mark Miller, has been charged with "fraudulent use of personal information" for the orders that targeted the judges. But Salas said this accountability is rare. "State bad actors have been caught," she said, but the acts of intimidation against federal judges have come from "unknown sources." "That troubles me," Salas said, "because we don't know who is doing this. We don't know whether this is a group of bad actors, a few bad actors. But clearly judges are being targeted, and the message is clear."
