Harassment Experiences of Women Journalists in Lebanon

We’ve reached the final session of AoIR 2023, which I’ll moderate – and the first of its two papers is by Azza El-Masri. Her focus is especially on the experience of Lebanese women and queer journalists on WhatsApp. The background to this is the national secular protest movement against the proposal for a tax on WhatsApp – which is a platform of major importance in the country, and a key infrastructure of sociality in a country that has struggled in recent years with major political and economic challenges.

WhatsApp has also been beset with mis- and disinformation originating especially from Hezbollah, however; it has been used for collective harassment against women journalists, who have also been doxxed by militants. WhatsApp has thus been used for complaints against the Lebanese government, but also reproduces systems of oppression of women and minorities.

What might a WhatsApp without harassment look like, then? How do women and queer journalists imagine a better WhatsApp? Azza’s project contacted some 14 interviews with women and queer journalists, activists, and digital rights activists to explore this, and found a number of patterns in their responses.

First, the platform’s existing complaint mechanisms reproduce participants’ sense of alienation: a woman journalist who was doxxed by Hezbollah supporters was so inundated by harassment that she could no longer use the platform, or even her phone, and was thus unable to do her job; she also did not trust WhatsApp’s security mechanisms, and this means that a notion of safety no longer exists. In effect, this reproduces the sectarian patriarchal status quo in Lebanon: it makes women (and queer) journalists feel invisible, powerless, and threatened. Digital and physical risks are interconnected.

This also produces a strong sense of techno-pessimism: entirely unsupported by technology, they feel unable to imagine a better kind of WhatsApp, not least also because they believe that the needs of Lebanese journalists are far from top of mind for WhatsApp developers and operators. Indeed, they feel that these issues are not just limited to WhatsApp, but apply more broadly to Internet infrastructures.