Women, minorities, and human rights defenders among the most targeted online
SMEX’s Digital Safety Helpdesk supports activists, journalists, marginalized groups, and human rights defenders facing cybersecurity incidents and online threats in West Asia and North Africa. We work directly with affected individuals to address account suspensions, doxxing, sexual blackmail, and other forms of cyberviolence, content moderation, and other issues.
Like many other helplines, SMEX’s work has become more difficult in 2025. We have experienced longer response times and fewer satisfactory resolutions from social media platforms in response to our requests.
So far this year we have received the following cases:
- 279 cases from human rights defenders whose content was taken down by social media platforms.
- 180 cases from journalists mainly publishing about the war on Gaza and dealing with violations of their freedom of expression impacting their work.
- We received 214 cases related to Online Gender Based Violence (OGBV).
- 14 cases of account impersonation or harassment in chats on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
- We reported more than 100 cases of misinformation, incitement, and doxxing related to the attacks in Suweida in July.
Worsening responsiveness from social media companies
We faced particular challenges with resolving cases on Meta’s platforms. As of this year, it no longer considers impersonation as a violation to be addressed. Instead, they respond to these cases with a form for users to fill, with little to no results. We have received many cases of account impersonation and even blackmail—which in the context of West Asia and North Africa, may severely harm women.
The teams we contacted refused to consider the seriousness of these cases and concluded our communications with a standardized message saying that the risk of imminent harm to the users in our reports was “not clear.”
In most cases, tickets are eventually resolved, but the response time could be up to 14 days, with occasional negative resolutions. This endangers women in particular. A small percentage of these tickets never got any response.
We have seen an extremely concerning uptick in hate speech and misinformation related to Syria in the last few months. As we feared, platforms like Meta and YouTube are not doing well in moderating content in the context of Syria. They fail to grasp coded hate speech while continuing to improperly remove human-rights related content.
Telegram, considered a hub for inciting content that translates into violence on the ground, remains unresponsive to civil society. Telegram remains the primary communication platform in Syria and appears to be a safe haven for such harmful content. Other reports about suspended accounts and activities primarily concern speech related to holding the new regime accountable for the violence that unfolded over the past two months.
We also witnessed many platform’s failure in dealing with dangerous hate speech and privacy violations directed at feminist human rights defenders. Their policies are not strong enough in this regard, while also erring on the side of allowing this content in the name of “free speech.” They often deny the Helpdesk’s requests when related to online gender based violence.
We believe it is not a coincidence that some of the old problems have ramped up amidst weakened hate speech policies and massive layoffs, including among content moderators and other Trust and Safety staff. X lost control over hate speech a few years ago, but Meta and YouTube changed their policies to allow more hateful content—arguably including incitement to violence.
Meta publicly announced this in January, changing its policies to keep hate speech against transgender people and weakening protections for immigrants and women. YouTube made its changes secretly in December of last year, instructing moderators to leave up more content in the public interest—including discussions about women, immigrants, and trans people.
In the coming months, SMEX’s Digital Safety Helpdesk will continue to pay close attention to these issues, and advocate for impacted communities as we have always done.
Image by AFP.
