Having been approached by a number of female charity CEOs who had experienced trolling, Social CEOs and ACEVO decided to undertake a joint survey to obtain initial findings into the experience of these women. We are very grateful to them for sharing their stories.

We learned that:

• Respondents have experienced comments about the organisation and its leaders, inappropriate behaviour and personal, targeted attacks.
• Trolling  affects CEOs of both small and large charities
• 11% of respondents say trolling had a major impact on their charity
• Respondents told us that their experiences had led to limiting what they say and do online, feelings of isolation from friends and family, and a negative impact on their mental health such as stress and anxiety and feeling personally attacked.

This report is intended to start the conversation about trolling in the sector. Respondents have made suggestions about the support they would like and Charity Digital Trust will be organising a roundtable to help define next steps in more detail.

What we did 

Through conversations with charity leaders we became aware that a number of civil society leaders had experienced and been affected by trolling.  In initial conversations we spoke with men and women that have experienced trolling, and ACEVO has previously produced a briefing for its members on this subject.  However it became apparent in these initial conversations that women often experience particularly challenging trolling, which can include misogynistic abuse.

The online abuse of women in public facing roles, especially MPs, has been the subject of a lot of recent discussion.  In order to explore this further we decided to undertake research into the experiences of female civil society CEOS. The purpose of the research was to shine a light on what had happened to them, to find out what that tells us about the support they need, how they’d like things to change on social media and how the sector could support them.

• “Lots of requests to ‘follow’ from men on linked in and twitter. These might be algorithms- not sure but it is unpleasant.”
• Specific DMs from men on twitter…..with photos or sleazy introductions of themselves.”

• “On Twitter, when I use the hashtag feminism, or when I talk about why it is important to empower women, I get random tweets attacking me and my ideological position. There have been quite a few and I have just chosen to ignore.
• “In one specific case however, I had a male volunteer who had questionable behaviour, and I dismissed him (I had consulted a lawyer and we dismissed him within reasonable grounds). He kept messaging me on Facebook and even though I blocked him, he found other ways to contact me e.g. email, WhatsApp, etc. It was causing me a lot of stress and I worried that he would know my location and keep track of me in person. It fizzled out after a week but it caused me a great deal of stress and anxiety. From then on I was also more cautious of establishing one to one contact with male volunteers.”

• “An anonymous person started sending frequent and abusive tweets to me and a few other people blaming us, particularly me, for child deaths. This was tangentially related to a job I left over a year ago. Other anonymous accounts joined in but I suspect they were the same person. When it started to make me feel scared I blocked them. But didn’t want to as I felt I should be aware of what was being said.”

• “Trolling was instigated by a well known personality who should have known better, and led to personal abuse and death threats. It was a tiny organisation without the resources or experience to cope with this. It left me (as CEO) feeling suicidal, as the only way to end it.”

The summarised responses can be read via https://www.socialceos.org/our-survey-on-trolling-in-the-charity-sector-with-acevo/

November 17, 2019