Due to issues with sourcing and written quality of the following report it wasn't originally going to be mentioned in this topic but for the number of outlets pushing this forward as a 'considered' (not their word) approach to controlling privacy and speech on the Internet (as it pertains to abuse on the Internet): "
A Report by the UN Broadband Commission for the Digital Development Working Group on Broadband and Gender: Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls - A World-Wide Wake-Up Call". In a nutshell the central premise of the report is that "online violence" toward women and girls should stop (and by "extension", men and boys).
To do this the term "online violence" is often framed using language that conflates it with real-world (physical?) violence (in terms of '
actual harm' that may be done). In other words the Commission equate the phrase to a person "
not just receiving death threats but the daily grind of being told 'you're a liar' or 'you suck'" with a women in an Emergency Room contused, rids broken, wrists fractured due to 'violence' perpetrated by another. Are the two truly the same?
What's worse is the reports obvious bias toward gender specific abuses in support of its general theme at the expense of the broader picture; women do indeed receive more
gendered abuse, i.e. comments based solely around their being female; which contrasts with men being in receipt of the greater degree of abuse that's more broadly applied, i.e. boys/men are more likely to receive death threats, or just told they suck at something (stats on this vary depending on the questions asked, who's doing the asking/answering, which it's always worth considering).
If a solution to online abuse is to be sought it should not be done at the expense of one gender (****) over the other, nor should it be done through suggestions of outright censorship of expression. Requesting service providers monitor and approve comments is unilaterally impractical due to the volume of traffic generated by current users, expand that outwards to include areas of the globe coming online and the numbers become impossibly large - this is all notwithstanding service providers already providing systems and tools users can use to report and block abuse. Government should only ever be involved when there's criminal intent, i.e. calls to incite/actionable violence etc. as law currently stands (and even this has its problems where free expression crosses 'religion' or other particularly rigid 'systems' of thought).
[EDIT]As of 6th October (date of writing this update) the CVAWG report has been pulled from the official ITU blog, replaced with a PDF stating its being revised. The report can however still be acquired in its current form from the link at the top of the article (note that even it may be updated once the report is changed). Additional sources added below.Further ReadingNote: the following are not provided to prove a point one way or the other, rather they illustrate the complexity of the underlying issue, that males and females engage in different *types* of harassment as well as receive based on gender biases, circumstance and many, many other mitigating circumstance.
UN Sources
