Activists around the world are calling attention to harassment they’ve faced on Meta’s platforms. More than 90 percent of land and environmental defenders surveyed by Global Witness, a nonprofit organization that also tracks the murders of environmental advocates, reported experiencing some kind of online abuse or harassment connected to their work. Facebook was the most-cited platform, followed by X, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
Global Witness and many of the activists it surveyed are calling on Meta and its peers to do more to address harassment and misinformation on their platforms. Left to fester, they fear that online attacks could fuel real-world risks to activists. Around 75 percent of people surveyed said they believed that online abuse they experienced corresponded to offline harm.
“Those stats really stayed with me. They were so much higher than we expected them to be,” Ava Lee, campaign strategy lead on digital threats at Global Witness, tells The Verge. That’s despite expecting a gloomy outcome based on prior anecdotal accounts. “It has kind of long been known that the experience of climate activists and environmental defenders online is pretty awful,” Lee says.
Left to fester, they fear that online attacks could fuel real-world risks
Global Witness surveyed more than 200 people between November 2024 and March of this year that it was able to reach through the same networks it taps when documenting the killings of land and environmental defenders. It found Meta-owned platforms to be “the most toxic.” Around 62 percent of participants said they encountered abuse on Facebook, 36 percent on WhatsApp, and 26 percent on Instagram.
That probably reflects how popular Meta’s platforms are around the world. Facebook has more than 3 billion active monthly users, more than a third of the global population. But Meta also abandoned its third-party fact-checking program in January, which critics warned could lead to more hate speech and disinformation. Meta moved to a crowdsourced approach to content moderation similar to X, where 37 percent of survey participants reported experiencing abuse.
In May, Meta reported a “small increase in the prevalence of bullying and harassment content” on Facebook as well as “a small increase in the prevalence of violent and graphic content” during the first quarter of 2025.
“That’s sort of the irony as well, of them moving towards this kind of free speech model, which actually we’re seeing that it’s silencing certain voices,” says Hannah Sharpe, a senior campaigner at Global Witness.
Fatrisia Ain leads a local collective of women in Sulawesi, Indonesia, where she says palm oil companies have seized farmers’ lands and contaminated a river local villagers used to be able to rely on for drinking water. Posts on Facebook have accused her of being a communist, a dangerous allegation in her country, she tells The Verge.
The practice of “red-tagging” — labeling any dissident voices as communists — has been used to target and criminalize activists in Southeast Asia. In one high-profile case, a prominent environmental activist in Indonesia was jailed under “anti-communism” laws after opposing a new gold mine.
Ain says she’s asked Facebook to take down several posts attacking her, without success. “They said it’s not dangerous, so they can’t take it down. It is dangerous. I hope that Meta would understand, in Indonesia, it’s dangerous,” Ain says.
Other posts have accused Ain of trying to defraud farmers and of having an affair with a married man, which she sees as attempts to discredit her that could wind up exposing her to more threats in the real world — which has already been hostile to her activism. “Women who are being the defenders for my own community are more vulnerable than men … more people harass you with so many things,” she says.
Nearly two-thirds of people who responded to the Global Witness survey said that they have feared for their safety, including Ain. She’s been physically targeted at protests against palm oil companies accused of failing to pay farmers, she tells The Verge. During a protest outside of a government office, men grabbed her butt and chest, she says. Now, when she leads protests, older women activists surround her to protect her as a security measure.
In the Global Witness survey, nearly a quarter of respondents said they’d been attacked on the basis of their sex. “There’s evidence of the way that women and women of color in particular in politics experience just vast amounts more hate than any other group,” Lee says. “Again, we’re seeing that play out when it comes to defenders … and the threats of sexual violence, and the impact that that is having on the mental health of lots of these defenders and their ability to feel safe.”
“We encourage people to use tools available on our platforms to help protect against bullying and harassment,” Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton said in an email to The Verge, adding that the company is reviewing Facebook posts that targeted Ain. Meta also pointed to its “Hidden Words” feature that allows you to filter offensive direct messages and comments on your posts and its “Limits” feature that hides comments on your posts from users that don’t follow you.
Other companies mentioned in the report, including Google, TikTok, and X, did not provide on-the-record responses to inquiries from The Verge. Nor did a palm oil company Ain says has been operating on local farmers’ land without paying them, as they’re supposed to do under a mandated profit-sharing scheme.
Global Witness says there are concrete steps social media companies can take to address harassment on their platforms. That includes dedicating more resources to their content moderation systems, regularly reviewing these systems, and inviting public input on the process. Activists surveyed also reported that they think algorithms that boost polarizing content and the proliferation of bots on platforms make the problem worse.
“There are a number of choices that platforms could make,” Lee says. “Resourcing is a choice, and they could be putting more money into really good content moderation and really good trust and safety [initiatives] to improve things.”
Global Witness plans to put out its next report on the killings of land and environmental defenders in September. Its last such report found that at least 196 people were killed in 2023.
Read the full article here
