Online Harassment in Majority Contexts: Examining Harms and Remedies across Countries

Title of the Paper

Online Harassment in Majority Contexts: Examining Harms and Remedies across Countries

Paper Information

• Subject Area: Social Media, Online Harassment, Global Governance
• Keywords: Online harassment, online abuse, trust, courts, non-Western, Global South, social media, online governance

Research Background and Issues

• Problems or Challenges:

  • Online harassment is a global issue, encompassing behaviors such as hate speech, abuse, misinformation dissemination, and non-consensual content sharing.
  • Social media platforms struggle to manage online content governance in multilingual and multicultural contexts, increasing the complexity of addressing online harassment.
  • Most research on online harms remains focused on the U.S. and European contexts, neglecting the broader experiences of the majority of the world.

• Significance:

  • Online harassment can lead to various harms, including psychological distress, economic instability, and threats to life. The global impact of these issues makes governance particularly critical.
  • Designing effective online experiences for a diverse global user base requires a deep understanding of the needs of different regions and cultures.

• Research Motivation and Related Work:

  • Many technology companies and studies focus on U.S.-centric contexts, overlooking the unique challenges and experiences of regions such as South Asia and Africa.
  • There is widespread distrust in global social media governance, particularly in systems centered on U.S. and European platforms.
  • The authors aim to fill the academic gap regarding harassment harms and governance preferences in diverse cultural contexts through cross-national research.

Solutions

• Methods or Solutions:

  • Conduct cross-national surveys covering 14 countries (including 13 countries and the Caribbean region).
  • Design and implement questionnaires addressing harassment types, harm measurement, governance preferences, and demographic data.
  • Use statistical methods (e.g., Welch’s rank-sum test, linear regression) to analyze the relationships between harassment perceptions and governance preferences across countries and demographic characteristics.

• Innovative Aspects:

  • Incorporating global socio-cultural contexts into a large-scale comparative study on online harassment harms and governance preferences.
  • Continuously exploring the complexity of harassment behaviors and the need for culturally, socially, and internationally collaborative policy designs.

• Implementation Steps and Key Techniques:

  1. Survey Design and Translation: Iteratively develop and refine the questionnaire to address linguistic and cultural differences.
  2. Data Collection: Recruit participants from different countries through various methods (survey companies, research teams, etc.).
  3. Data Cleaning and Analysis: Exclude low-quality responses and use R software for descriptive statistics, regression analysis, and exploratory factor analysis.
  4. Qualitative Analysis of Supervised Responses: Extract themes through coding and multiple rounds of calibration.

Research Findings

• Specific Findings:

  • Sexual harassment (e.g., non-consensual sharing of sexual images) is widely perceived as the most severe form of harassment.
  • Perceptions of harassment vary significantly across countries, with culturally and economically disadvantaged countries often perceiving higher levels of harm.
  • Regarding governance preferences, most countries favor compensation, apologies, and public identification of perpetrators over content removal.
  • Women generally perceive greater harassment harms than men and prefer stronger governance measures.

• Advantages Compared to Existing Solutions:

  • Complements existing literature by revealing the unique cultural impacts of harassment through research in non-Western contexts.
  • Provides in-depth cross-regional insights that can help adapt global platform governance strategies.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  • Multivariate regression analysis reveals complex interactions between harassment types and demographic characteristics.
  • Data indicates that harassment governance cannot adopt a "one-size-fits-all" approach and requires multi-layered, personalized designs.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • Limitations: The sample may be biased toward active internet users and may not fully represent the overall population of each country.
  • Future Directions: Focus on cross-border harassment governance and explore adaptive models for cultural diversity; promote collaborative governance between platforms and local policies.