 Asia webinar series for 2021. Today, we will be looking at International Ideas report on online violence against female politicians in Fiji. I'll just start by introducing Adiyaman, who is the Senior Program Manager for International Ideas Asia and the Pacific Regional Program and Country Manager for the Fijian Mongolia programs. Aman. Thank you very much, Ramitesh. Well, everyone, I'd like to begin to by acknowledging the Nganuwal people, traditional coach students of the land on which I speak from today, and pay my respects to the elders past and present. Welcome to the second webinar in International Ideas Democratic Development in Melanesia series. International Idea has the only intergovernmental organization with the sole mandate of supporting sustainable democracy, has been a strong supporter of women's participation and representation in politics. We've been a partner of the I Know Politics partnership, Global Partnership. We've got the gender quota database for more than two decades now. We published the Women in Parliament Handbook, Designing for Equality, Electro-System Design Guide, and many others. Now, more recently, the rise of social media and how it's been used in the Melanesian region, particularly in Fiji, has led us to study its impact on women politicians. Such a study can help us and others understand the new challenges current and aspiring women politicians face. Therefore, we decided to work with Membo 98, a civil society organization that has the technical expertise and experience to conduct such a study. Rastore Kuzel, its executive director, is here with us today to present the main findings of this study. The report itself is still under finalization and will be released very soon. So many thanks, Rastore, for waking up early to do this for us. I know the time difference is not very helpful, but thank you very much for doing it. As far as we know, this is an unprecedented study, and we intend to keep on building upon it for the foreseeable future. On that note, I hand the screen back to Romitesh, in Akavaka Libu. Thank you, Adi. I'll just introduce the presenters and the order of presentations that we will follow in this webinar. So as Adi mentioned, Rastore Kuzel would be presenting the main findings of the research. Rastore from Slovakia. And he's a media analyst and expert with over two decades of international experience since 1998. Rastore has been the executive director of memo 98, a media institution with extensive experience of delivering media monitoring on behalf of international institutions, and as well as providing assistance to civil society groups. So Rastore and memo 98 have been involved with international idea in conducting this research and analyzing the results. And then after Rastore, we have two discussants from Fiji. We have Annan Balilevuka, who's the online safety commissioner for the online safety commission in Fiji. She's a lawyer by profession. She's also very passionate about youth empowerment and empowerment of young women in Fiji. And the second discussant is Lossana Tiraviravi from the Fiji Women's Rights Movement, who's currently the acting team leader for intergenerational women in leadership program at the Fiji Women's Rights Movement. She's been within the women's movement and the feminist movement since 2009, so very long extensive engagement. And she's also been very active with the Fiji Women Forum and the Fiji Women's Forum. And she's participated in various spaces in national forums and regional and international forums. So I'll hand over to Rastore to take us through the findings of the research. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thanks a lot for this kind of invitation. As Adi already mentioned, it's a very early morning here in Slovakia, so please, first of all, bear with me. I hope that I will be able to go through this presentation without any interruptions. But it was a very interesting experience for our team. Indeed, as it has already been mentioned, it's a very sort of unique and pilot study that we have conducted. But at the same time, I think it's a very important topic because we see that this really has come with the advent of social media. But particularly, perhaps at the beginning, we saw rather positive sort of positive aspects of social media involvement in political campaigns. But certainly, online violence against women has surfaced as one of the negative aspects. And so perhaps without further ado, let me share the screen. If you can just confirm that you can see the screen now. Is it visible? Yes. Very good. So maybe before I start, I will just mention a few words about Memo 98. So as it has already been explained, we are indeed looking at election campaigns in particular. So for a couple of decades, we have been mainly focusing on the media coverage of elections. Obviously, when we started 20 years ago, we were mainly focusing on so-called traditional media coverage. But as social media has evolved, so since about 2015, we have started looking also at the social media coverage of elections. And with this, obviously, we looked at phenomena such as this information. And in that sense, we have been working with journalists. We believe that the best response to this information around elections is good quality journalism. So we have been also providing trainings and assistance to journalists. And in that sense, we also looked at how media cover different vulnerable groups and minorities. And I think it's in these aspects of our work that we have in the past also done monitoring in the different stereotyping of media vis-a-vis vulnerable groups. And in that context also, we looked at the media coverage of women in some other countries. But certainly, monitoring of online violence against women, it's really for the first time that we have done. Actually, let me, I think I have just a second. I think I have the wrong presentation opened on my computer. So apologies for this. I will open the correct one. OK, here we go. Apologize for this. Didn't realize it. But now it should be there. This is it. I hope you can still see my screen. So basically, these little dots are those countries where we have worked so far. So it's about 56 countries. And certainly, as I mentioned, it was for the first time that we looked at social media coverage of women. And basically, at the beginning of the research, we looked at what social media are important in the context of Fiji. And so we identified Facebook as being the most important social media in the country. So that is why we decided to look at Facebook. In particular, when we look at the most recent figures from data portal, which is an organization which maps social media globally, it is clear that around 570,000 people basically look at Facebook. And so in comparison, for example, with Instagram, it's about 140,000 people and about less than 15,000 people are on Twitter. So clearly, this is why we decided to focus on Facebook. I should say that in terms of the methodology, Memo has certain tools for so-called data mining, data scrapping. So we have unique access to Facebook thanks to Crowdsangle. So thanks to Crowdsangle, we can see public accounts and public groups on Facebook. And we have historic access to this data. So this is also one of the reasons why we, in this particular study, looked at public groups, public accounts. There are clearly in connection with this topic. It could have been, and it would have been perhaps interesting to also look at private groups where perhaps the language and the online treatment in general could also be probably very interesting to the research. But in this particular study, we only looked at public accounts and public groups. In terms of the monitoring periods, so we decided to research three different periods. So it was a period of a couple of months in 15 September and 14 November 2018. We also looked at 15 November 13th of January 2019. And the last period was 15 October 13 December 2020. Obviously, the idea was to look at the data retrospectively, particularly in connection of the election. So a couple of months before the 2018 elections and after. And then just to have a comparison in 2020 and to see how the situation has evolved. We focused on 17 public pages of women politicians. We focused on 28 public pages of 24 men politicians. We just wanted to be able to have some kind of comparison. And so we decided to not only look at women politicians, but also we decided to look at men politicians. We also looked at a couple of pages of social media influencers, one public page of the media, and six public groups. In terms of the qualitative criteria, we basically decided to define the content, which we would define as problematic, which would contain certain aspects, such as it would be sexist against female or against male. Male politicians. So under this, it would be any comment that is demeaning discriminatory, abusive, or derogatory towards an individual group because of gender or gender presentation. So these included particularly comments on the appearance that imply a gendered element. We also thought that it's important to look at the content which is racist, which is ethnicity-based. Again, the same criteria against both female or male politicians. We also looked at threats. And here we basically defined threats as any comment directed towards an individual or group that articulates an intention to cause injury or result in a reasonable fear or harm. These included threats of sexualized violence directed towards individuals. Another criteria was political victimization. Here, we looked at any abusive or threatening comments targeting the politic release, ideology, or affiliation of an individual. And finally, the last, the fifth criteria was basically called personal or individual abuse. Here, we were looking at comments directed at the individual personal characteristics, appearance, family life, or other non-political aspects of their life. So in terms of the actual findings, so in all three periods, I think we analyzed roughly 2,603 posts on Facebook and about 99,000 comments. So when I say we, it was a team of media analysts that we hired or that actually worked with us rather, all senior analysts who have had previous experience with working with us. And basically, they looked into all these posts. So in these posts, we identified about 11% of these posts as having these problematic content. And what was interesting was that actually these problematic content was mostly present in comments, as you can see on the chart on the right side. So about 70%, it was in comments. About 13%, it was present in posts themselves. And the rest, about 17%, it was in both posts and comments. What was another interesting finding was that basically, we found that of these problematic content, the highest number, or the highest portion, rather, about 47.2% was in the form of political victimization, where abusive or threatening comments targeted political beliefs, ideology, or affiliation. And so it was particularly, we saw that it was targeted mainly against male politicians. So this was in about 323 comments, it was targeting male politicians. At the same time, what is acting very important to mention is that about four times more problematic content related to Facebook pages of male politicians, so about 133 cases in comparison with their female counterparts. So interestingly, the men were subjected more online values than women. However, it is important to note that a great majority of the problematic comments towards women politicians are in the sexist category. So they were mainly focusing on their appearance rather than the content of the political aspects of what they basically focused on. And also, what was very important finding was that we saw, when we looked at the actual posts by male and female politicians, we actually saw that in 35 cases, the male politicians were actually perpetrators of some of those categories of problematic content that we described. Whereas we did not see any case where a female politician would use such problematic language. When we look at the actual categories. Rastov. Yes. Sorry, Adi here. A participant requests that you make the presentation full screen, because some of the texts are too small. OK. I can see. Maybe you can hit the green button on the top left. My screen, it is full. But let me try to do it perhaps once again. Is it the same? Now, or is it better? It's better, yeah? OK, very good apologies for that. So basically, as I said, on this chart here, you can actually see that when we looked at all three periods, among monitor categories, Facebook pages of male politicians produce the highest number, almost half of all identified problematic cases. So this included, as I already mentioned, the posts of male politicians, but also in the comments. So there were about 133 posts out of the total 285 posts that we identified as problematic. So roughly about 46% that problematic content was on male politicians' accounts in comparison with public groups, which was the second category where we identified around 98 problematic posts. And then you can see that the following categories were female media and then the influencers. The next chart was, we saw a very similar picture when it comes. So the previous one was looking at the posts. And this one basically looks at the comments that we saw on those posts. So you can see that there was a very similar pattern. So when it comes to these different categories that we looked at, as I already mentioned, political victimization against male politicians was the category with highest appearance of that problematic content. The second category was sexist against female, then political victimization against female and personal abuse against female politicians, and then followed by racist, ethnically, nationally based sort of content against female politicians. And then the last category is where personal abuse against male and racist and ethnically, nationally based content against male politicians. And we saw roughly similar type of structure when it comes to the comments on those posts. So I will move on. And I wanted to say that particularly the problematic content that we saw was after the male politicians, we saw it mainly in public groups. So we identified the public groups and I will also come back to that a little bit later how we identified these public groups and accounts. But certainly it was quite important to look at the public groups. And here, again, we saw the biggest appearance was political victimization against male and then personal abuse against female politicians and so on and so forth. And here we identified roughly 98 posts which were problematic as either problematic in the actual posts or in comments or in both posts and comments. And when I look at the actual comments, again, we saw a similar picture there. I want to mention that through the three periods, we saw that there were particularly three cases which we assessed or evaluated. And these were three cases against prominent women politicians. So the most visible case was the case of Ms. Lenora Kere Tabua. I apologize if I mispronounced her name. And then there were a couple of more cases. It was also the case of Ms. Linda Tabua and the case of Redi Damodar that we saw during this period. And in particular, I think what is important to mention that whenever there was a critical or favorable post about male politicians, the discussions usually revolved around the party lines. And usually, if attacked, usually the party line was being used under the fire. By contrast, women were frequently targeted on a personal level, like in the case of these mentioned women. So for example, in the case of a member of parliament, Redi Damodar, the question was evolving around how much did she pay to help a housekeeper. This was discussed country-wide or based on her physical appearance, such as commenting on Ms. Linda Tabua's dress that she won for the opening of the parliament after the 2018 elections. But again, as I said, the most prominent case involved Ms. Lenora and her rumors about the existence of the alleged sex video that was supposed to involve her. So these were the three cases that were definitely very much visible through the whole study. Now, one thing that we also looked at was what I would describe as network mapping. So basically, we looked at certain keywords or URLs. And so we basically mined the data from Facebook. And then we looked at certain pieces of problematic content. And then we tried to see how it is disseminated further on these public groups and these public accounts. And so for example, in the case of Ms. Lenora, this is basically how the content about her was disseminated. And here on this chart, it is basically you can see different colors. And you can probably see the public groups, which we researched, such as Fiji Newslink or Fiji Exposed Forum. So by this early identification, this helped us to actually see where this content is disseminated. So the bigger the bubbles are, the more this content about her was disseminated. And this helped us to basically identify those important actors, so to say, of disseminating this content. So this is something that we also used for the first time, this sort of network mapping. And this was something that helped us to identify who are the actors. So in conclusion, I will just do some summary of our findings. So again, by comparison with their male colleagues, female politicians are treated in a less serious manner on Facebook as comments to their post touch upon their appearance and on personal qualities rather than commenting or analyzing their politics. So apart from the smear campaigning against women politicians, there were many stereotypical comments such as how beautiful, how nice they are, and similar ones. 11% of the posts, as I already mentioned, were found problematic. And these all contained those five different criteria, being sexist, racist, threatening, politically victimizing, or personal abuse. And most problematic content, almost 70%, was identified within the comments by the general public rather than by politicians, the media, or the research influencers. So of the 285 problematic posts, there were 38 posts that contained the problematic language. In the text of the post, 49 posts where this was contained in the post or in the comments, and 189 posts that contained the problematic language only in the comments, we found the 90 problematic posts in the first period that we monitored, 63 in the second period, and as many as 132 problematic posts in the last period, which basically suggested that the frequency of the problematic posts has been growing. Whenever there was a critical or favorable post about male politicians, the discussion, as I already mentioned, usually revolved around the party lines. And so it was basically the party line which was being used under fire. And by contrast, women were frequently targeted on a personal level, like in those mentioned cases, based on physical appearance. And again, as I said, the most prominent case was certainly the case of Ms. Lenora, which was, by the way, also one of the reasons why we started this study. There was no problematic content identified in the post of women politicians compared to 35 such problematic posts on their male counterparts. And overall, it was four times more problematic content related to Facebook pages of male politicians in comparison with their female counterparts. Therefore, interestingly, and I will conclude here, the men were more subjected to online violence than women. However, it is important to note that a great majority of the problematic comments towards women politicians are in the sexist category. And perhaps the very last conclusion, Facebook pages of male politicians produce the highest number of all identified problematic cases with the problematic content identified either in the posts, in both posts and comments, or only within the comments. So 133 posts out of the total, 285 posts. And on the other side, Facebook pages of female politicians produce 32 problematic posts, which was about 11%. But again, this was mainly applying in terms of the comments. So maybe I will stop it here. Obviously, there will be more information that you will be able to get in the report, which is coming very soon. But this was perhaps just to share the main findings from our reports. And obviously, I will be very happy to answer any questions a little bit later. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for presenting the main findings. Just housekeeping, if there's any questions that you want to ask, all the questions can be asked after the presentation by the two discussants, Endan and Losana. Also, either in the chat function, you can use the chat function, or you can raise your hand once all the presentations have been done. Also, to note that Endan has a commitment at 3 o'clock. So she'll present for five minutes, and then she'll stay around until 3 o'clock. So if you need any questions specifically for End, use the chat function, and then we can proceed to asking that. So I'll hand over to End for her presentation. Hi, Mullah everyone. Sorry, I apologize. My internet connection is not doing so well today, and the joys of technology. So my video will be off for a majority of this. But Bulu and Akron, thank you, Mr. Kujo, for your presentation on the initial findings of this report. We're really excited to sort of see what comes out of this discussion. It's great to virtually be here, and I thank the organizers for extending an invitation to us. As introduced, my name is Annie Donbuley-Lehuca, and I'm from the online safety commission, also called the OSC. And by way of brief introduction, the commission is the first established agency dedicated to empowering Fugeans to use the internet safely and responsibly. And we have two main functions amongst others. One is to advocate safe online habits, bringing our well-renowned Mullah spirit to the digital world. And two, the commission provides a space for individuals to report online abuse, such as online bullying and image-based abuse. And we find appropriate redress for those reports. We can appreciate the initial findings of this report as it focused on a particular set of parameters. And while the internet provides tools such as social media platforms to foster communities with like-minded and like valued interactions, it's easy for us to see from the examples presented, especially of our three well-respected women politicians, how quickly we are more drawn to the vices of these tools, particularly when it comes to politics. However, aspiring women politicians or elected women officials should not be discouraged to advocate for their issues that they believe in on these digital spaces. There's definitely great potential to add value to their offline communities by engaging with them online, especially during these more restricted physical interactions or time period where we have lockdowns and contaminants. Although it is highly encouraged that before we fully engulf ourselves on these platforms, we take note of protective measures as we would, say, perhaps, if we're driving a vehicle. And you can find helpful tips on our website on how to protect your online space to be able to do that and also social media companies like Facebook offer an array of resources freely accessible to individuals who are running for office or already elected officials. We recognize that there's a disparity between the access to technologies and understanding how to use the apps or devices safely. As pointed out by Mr. Puzzle, Facebook continues to draw the majority of our population, even almost straight down the middle between males and females. And even though in this particular monitoring exercise, they looked at more male public pages and more male politicians, we know and we're aware of the fact that women and girls are disproportionately impacted by online abuse. It's really important for us to recognize that these billion dollar companies such as Facebook want us to stay online. But much of the work to be safe and proactive require us as individuals who are using these digital platforms to bring our offline values, such as respect, collaboration, critical thinking, and even the Talanoa spirit, which we've seen a lot of on Twitter, to our online personas. Of course, there will be digital ills that we cannot control. Some online users will choose to share undesirable content as we had seen yesterday. But where we feed our likes, shares, and comments, ultimately shape our news feed. And these are the things that we can control. We think that there's great value in the lessons that we could learn from a report such as this, especially of how these particularly 12 women politicians were treated during the aggregated three-year period. As a regulator, we are often seen as only responsive. So the content would have already been shared, posted, or messaged, and then the individual has to report in order for the commission to act. But championing online safety habits is something that all of us can do in our own respective spaces, especially now with all of the lockdowns and containment zones. The OSC currently has a handful of online safety champions who let their family and friends know how they could be safe on the internet and if you would like to join that, please feel free to contact us on our website, www.onlinesafetycommission.com. But I could also put a message on here. We recognize that technology facilitated gender-based abuse, such as those that are expressed in this report, is not one-dimensional. And the response must also be holistic. So as a country, we can cultivate a safer, more inclusive online environment for Fiji as a whole. And that takes fostering positive change in the spaces we're already engaged in. Thank you for your time, and I would really appreciate any questions that you have. I look forward to the more interactive aspect of this Zoom. Naka. Thank you. We'll now hear from Losana. Hi, everyone. Nisambulla and welcome again. And also, Bula Vinaka again from the Nosori Containment Area. So for the benefit of those that missed out on the introduction, my name is Losana Tiraviravi. And I work for the Fiji Women's Rights Movement, and I am the acting team leader for the Intergenerational Women's Leadership Program. First of all, I'd like to sincerely thank MIMO 98 and also International Idea for coming up with such an initiative and also providing wonderful and informative presentation that is really needed in this day and age, and also particularly on what you have presented from your presentation today. It is rather unfortunate to see the reflection and behavior towards our women leaders. And that sort of contributes to why women take their time to come forward and also to even stand for election or be potential candidates because of these unforeseen challenges that many women have to read about and also see as well. Particularly, I will talk about the organization. So the Fiji Women's Rights Movement has been a leading national women's organization in promoting women's political participation. And Eftoblare was established in 1986 and extensively promotes women in leadership and promotes women in leadership spaces as well as encouraging prospective women candidates towards Fiji General Elections from this far 2006. So Eftoblare has been involved in this area for quite a long time, recognizing the lack of women's participation and voice in the democratization process post the political upheavals of 2000 and 2006. Eftoblare engaged in collaborating with national women's organization that promoted women's political participation. And this would later build the Fiji Women's Forum which came about in 2012. So the Fiji Women's Forum is one of the projects that Eftoblare engages in. And this began in 2012, which led to bringing in four women's organizations to co-convene the Fiji Women's Forum. And such work has been conducted in terms of promoting and building the capacity of women in order to allow a space for women to participate in national democratic processes. So between 2012 and 2020, the Fiji Women's Forum have conducted five national consultations, even conducted two women in politics trainings, and even had the opportunity to provide a learning exchange with the women members of parliament to Timoleste. And also conducted some of the work undertaken towards democratization process and most importantly, keeping women engaged and informed, even to an extent of providing a space of intergenerational national convening where the Fiji Women's Forum came together with the Fiji Women's Forum to discuss and talk about ways in which to promote women and young women's political participation. And also in 2014, the Fiji Women's Forum conducted a public perception survey in partnership with the International Women's Development Agency. Why I'm sharing this survey is really because of the context. It's very much relevant as well. So the survey found that the following results to be significant. The majority of people in Fiji feel that women are underrepresented in government and then changing this would be beneficial to the nation as a whole. People recognize that the qualifications and attributes of leadership are not unique to men but are common in both men and women. And conservative viewpoints that favor male leadership are small but significant minority in certain demographics. And the strongest support for female leadership is found amongst women and young people. And so the findings also concluded that 17% of respondents would prefer to vote for women prior to the 2014 general election. So that is really sharing about that survey, which I feel that is still very much relevant to this context. And also with the FTABLA REM, we did an internal comparative analysis as well in terms of finding out how women fared through the elections for 2014 and 2018. So out of this analysis, we still found that women still face the same sets of challenges, which is the ongoing attacks, cyberbullying, sexist and misogynistic comments on women MPs, and particularly women candidates when they're preparing towards the election, mainly on social media. And further to that, a lot has been shared by the presentation that has been given to us today. I wouldn't really particularly want to elaborate on the women politicians that had their own experiences as well, because I had sort of prepared the same examples as well in terms of the three women politicians. I think in the case of Rida Damodar, where one particular case where she had to comment in terms of the name that she was using, which she herself had to defend in terms of why she was using the name Damodar. And this was in particularly to her being the custodian to her daughter. And that was one of the cases in which she had to explain about herself, which is really not fair for women to keep explaining about things that people are hounding about in terms of their personal issues, rather than really looking into what is the particular national interest that the woman is really standing for in terms of her own political campaign towards the elections. The other example that has already been mentioned regarding Linda Tambuya and her dressing that had been openly commented in parliament. For FDBLRM, we really did raise an issue regarding why women have to undergo through that. And we feel that women should be treated equally. They should be free and safe from discrimination and violence in our communities, and most certainly in the workplace. And Fiji has a high incidence rate of workplace harassment. So the parliament is the highest workplace in a country is where one would least expect this appalling behavior. And the shaming of a woman member of parliament for her choice of dressing parliament, instead of focusing on issues of national interest, really reflects widely on the negative attitudes towards women and the state of gender equality in Fiji. And the other issue as well in regards to Leonor Rangir-Gertambu's experience, where she had to face all those comments and derogatory remarks that was made against her. But as we were monitoring that as well on the behavior of how people were engaging on social media, so there were generally mixed responses as well that was happening on social media that we were able to also notice. So in all of these cases, people took to social media to make comments, often vilifying the female MP. And unfortunately, this sends a message to any upcoming candidates on what their experience would be like should they enter the political arena. So really, what has been the behavior and the environment that has been happening online really does reflect on how women are thinking about getting to be involved politically. And also a few things that I just want to end my question on is women are already underrepresented in parliament and struggle against pervasive discrimination and patriarchal norms of leadership to be in the space in the first place. And they are elected leaders of parliament. They are very much equal to their male colleagues and must be treated as such no matter their age, gender, and background. It is integral now more than ever to promote attitudes towards women and which CSOs, NGOs, and women's groups in Fiji and the Pacific and globally have continuously advocated, lobbied, and raised awareness on these issues. But uninformed misogynistic comments by prominent members of society and elected leaders threaten the progress we have made and the efforts towards addressing it. The leaders of Fiji must take responsibility to be informed of gender equality and condemn all forms of discrimination. It is everyone's responsibility as well to foster society that is free from violence and discrimination against women and girls. And moreover, our elected leaders in government will play a critical role and we must collectively denounce misogyny in Fiji. Thank you. Thank you, Losana and Anne. You can send your questions through via chat or raise your hands. Before Anne leaves, there are two questions via chat that have been put forward, three questions for Anne. The first question is from Roshika. She's asking if male and female politicians approach the commission's work to seek accountability for online violence. And if so, what process has been undertaken by male and female politicians? And the second question is from Dylan. He's asking if the commission itself can initiate an investigation that is in the public interest or is it only capable of acting on complaints that have been filed with them? So if the commission can be proactive rather than wait for complaints to be filed. So you can, both are a bit related. So maybe you can take these two first and then I'll ask the third question. Okay. Yeah, thank you for your questions. So in terms of male and female politicians accessing or lodging complaints with the commission, they're able to do so. And there's, everybody sort of just goes through the same complaints process you report to the commission. It's assessed for a certain amount of period to determine what sort of online abuse you are reporting. And then you're given, and then it's sent out for legal opinion or it's done internally as well. And if it's found to be an offense listed under the online safety act or the crimes decree, then it's most likely one of the referrals that we make to law enforcement. And so the complaints assessment process is really just to find the best remedy for that particular situation. And it also depends on the case itself and on the posts that people are referring to. But whether you're in public life or whether you are a private citizen, you're sort of afforded the same complaints process in terms of assessment because it's just so that we could tailor it to the particular complaint. In terms of whether we proactively engaged, in terms of our functions, there has to be a report made by the individual who's affected. And then we conduct our assessment and investigation. Otherwise, the commission does not actively monitor the digital space, but we do offer online safety tips that anybody who's online can help themselves to and be able to protect themselves. So just in terms of proactive measures for the commission, we're mostly engaging on advocacy and education when it comes to online safety. And that's done through the three streams of community awareness programs, school engagements, and of course just the verified Facebook page for OSC-Fiji and the online safety website, which is onlinesafetycommission.com. But there is a complaint scheme that everybody goes through and referrals are made to law enforcement. So we cannot, unfortunately, at this moment, our function prevents us from from launching an investigation in the sense that we cannot arrest or question in that way, but it is referred to law enforcement. Thank you. Yeah, one of the questions was on, has any politician so far sought the assistance of the commission in terms of online violence that has been perpetuated against them? And have they been male or female? So from off the top, I can think of only three, those who are in public life and politicians included that have lodged directly with the OSC and they were then given their options for how they wanted to proceed with their complaint because we usually have to seek collaboration from the people that are lodging the complaint. So yes, those in public life, including politicians have lodged reports with us. The third question, Litya had asked a question which you have addressed in terms of investigative processes. How do you, as the commission, assess the seriousness of a complaint that has been lodged? Are there certain tests that you follow to assess the seriousness? There's certain internal mechanisms that we use and a majority of that is also reflected in how it's laid out for courts to be able to assess a matter. And so we do take into consideration how many times that individual has been victimized or how many times that individual has been attacked online. We take into consideration the timeframe. There's different considerations for the type of person or how they're handling the situation. There's also consideration to age to the person's sex or gender, the person's occupation might even come into play, especially if it's posts that reflect back to their place of work. And so I did wanna mention that earlier in 2019, a lot of our reports were at least 39% which made up the majority of our 2019 reports were defamatory in nature. And because that already has a system of civil litigation, that was not something that we could consider as the commission. And so it was then referred to the appropriate mechanisms that you could sort out. Thank you, Anne. There's some questions to Rosto as well. One question is what was the ratio of male versus female in the study data that you've collected? And the second question is on Facebook groups that you identified or collected data from. These groups actually have credibility issues as well. How does the study summarize these against the political agenda that is in play as well? Given that all the female politicians that you've mentioned in your presentation, where from the opposition, political parties? Yeah, thank you very much. So perhaps I will start with the first question. So as I mentioned, we looked at 17 public pages of 12 women politicians and 28 public pages of 24 male politicians. So indeed the ratio there is tilted towards male politicians in terms of the overall quantity. But I think what also came out from the study and here obviously, I mean particularly when we looked at the content on the one media page or the public groups that in general, I think female politicians were less inclined to raise controversial issues or openly criticize their political opponents in their Facebook post. So that's why perhaps it generated less of these problematic content or reactions. I mean, I did mention that also these other statistics which was that in 35 cases actually in the posts of male politicians, I mean, we found these problematic content. So yes, but I do recognize that the ratio was sort of tilted towards male politicians. And I think one more perhaps interesting statistics was that four times more problematic content related to actually pages of male politicians. So this was 133 cases in comparison with female politicians which was 32. So overall, and this came as I already mentioned in the results, at the end, men were more subjected to online violence than women. But again, as I already mentioned, a great majority of the problematic comments towards women politicians were in this sexist category which I described initially. And then as for the second question, related to public groups. And then obviously here, I mean, I should say that I'm not an expert on local politics here, but basically we looked at all female politicians that actually had at the time of the study, these public profiles, public accounts on Facebook. So that was something that was important for us, particularly as mentioning that we had access to data, to public profiles and public groups. So all female politicians that do have accounts on Facebook and are relevant were actually subjects to the research. So in that sense, I don't think there was any sort of, any preference in terms of, that would be only opposition politicians present in the study. I mean, no, we did not have that sort of criteria rather it was the ability to actually access the data, which as I mentioned, we can access data on public accounts and public profiles. Thank you. I'll ask Roshika to unmute, she has a question while we go through the questions in the chat. Yes, Bula everyone, thank you all for the presentations. Just one comment and a question or both of them together. So you have acknowledged that there are more male politicians that were analyzed compared to female politicians, but this hasn't been taken into account in the analysis. And I think this should be taken into account in the final data analysis, otherwise the data is skewed. The other thing that I wanted to ask was, what is the ethnic diversity in the study? What is the ethnic desegregation of the people whose Facebooks that were analyzed? This would be a relevant and key variable given that one of the indicators of measuring online violence is ethnic-based or racist attacks. Thank you. Maybe I can I respond directly or okay, okay, sorry. Waiting for, I think these are, thank you very much. I mean, these are certainly valid points. I think we will obviously sort of reflect on this ethnicity issue. I think this certainly I think came out from the research that much of this problematic content indeed was actually based on ethnicity. So I think that's a very valid point. So at this stage, I do not have some kind of sort of breakdown of that because that was not somehow the main sort of goal of the study, but it's quite visible from the results that it featured rather high. So I think we will look at this sort of ratio as you suggested. And as for the first comments, yes, I think you have a point and this was, again, for us, it was a sort of pilot research and we recognize that we have some limitations. And I think this is generally when you look at the research which is done on Facebook, it is really the access to data which is the most problematic nowadays. And so in that sense, obviously, as I mentioned before, I mean, we were able to access, and particularly one last thing to mention is that all this research was done retroactively or so we were looking at the historic data, historic periods which I think should be also mentioned. And so, yes, we could basically research the data that we had at our disposal, but I think we did take that into consideration because this is why we had the qualitative criteria of the assessment and we were basically able to look at this from that perspective, which at the end of the day, I think what matters is really looking at this qualitative criteria and the type of treatment that female politicians are subjected to. And in that, I think the data is actually quite valid because it really proves that while perhaps in terms of quantity, the content is really tilted towards male politicians, but in terms of when you dive into the data and when you look at those criteria, then you see appearances which I think are very problematic of that type of language, which is sexist, which is stereotyping, which is basically looking at the appearance rather than at the content of what these politicians are offering. So, but yeah, I take that note. And again, the main reason was basically the fact that this was historical data that we looked at and the second criteria was the actual existence of the accounts which basically we identified at the very beginning. Thank you, Rusto. Maybe Losana can jump into this, answering this question as well with Rusto. This is from Victor. He's asking, at what point do we mortgage our free speech in our bid to commit to acceptable speech? So basically asking the question around, is there a fine line between criticism of a politician and committing forms of online violence and maybe from your international experience? And Losana can maybe come in from her extensive engagement within the women's rights feminist movements. Who should go first? Maybe ladies first? Yeah, either or. Losana, do you want to go? Take this question first. Yes. Okay. Basically it's clear. Really looking at the issues that are campaigning on rather than when you make a comment that is more personal, it's really building on the commenting really on the personal issues of a woman candidate or the women politician. But when it's about looking at what is really the issues around national development or what the woman is really campaigning on or talking about, that is definitely clear from my point of view between what is a fine line of what you comment on in regards to that. Yes. So I would basically, and thanks a lot for this. I think this is very important question because obviously we do not want to stifle the free speech on one side, on the other side. It's quite visible that when I look at the experience from other countries as well, that it is not enough to leave this up to this big social media platforms. So I don't think that it's enough to have just their community standards here. I think particularly when it comes to issues such as hate speech or this type of problematic content, I think we need to have clear rules that apply both to offline and online environment. And what is more is actually that we also need to have the implementation of these rules, which again is problematic because of the global nature of internet and global nature of these big players. So I think just without perhaps going into too much details, but I think in general, I think we should, whatever is in place when it comes to offline limits or free speech should be implemented also online. We should not feel that there is impunity, that we could make that we are not visible on internet. I think it's extremely important that there is this sort of responsibility. And also, this comes with another very important point to make, which is basically digital media literacy, that we are able to have some kind of, that we are actually not making such comments and that we understand that words could actually hurt. And I think this is extremely important for people to realize when it comes to online world. Thank you. There are two related questions by Nilesh and Dylan asking about the research methods. Did your research actually take into account that the comments and the posts that you extracted from this public Facebook domains? Did you try to distinguish between which are genuine accounts and which are fake or troll accounts? And Nilesh is going a step further asking if there was any linkages that you tried to make between certain troll accounts and going back to political parties because there are certain parties that have dedicated quite a lot of money towards online forms of campaigning as well in Fiji. Now that's an excellent point. And that's one reason why we looked also at this network mapping, but it's also, I have to say that this was applied by the end of the research. I mean, we did not have that capacity at the beginning. We are sort of developing this capacity these days to sort of enhance our methodology to be able to identify these type of amplifiers which are perhaps inauthentic. So basically talking of bots or fake accounts which could actually spread such content. And then of course, one thing that is very common these days is actually that political parties are indeed employing trolls. That actually work and try to sort of push certain content. The simple response is no, we did not actually look into whether those comments were done by trolls or who are those people who are behind this. The goal of this study was really first of all, look at the content and see whether there is the presence of this problematic content. And then, but definitely I agree that the deeper analysis of perhaps looking at those who are maybe the most obvious perpetrators would probably be very interesting and see the genuity, I mean, to what extent these are actually genuine accounts or whether this is the repetition of the same type of persons who are commenting. I mean, we did see, let's say manually that there were basically clearly some commenters who repeatedly were using this problematic language but now we did not dive in deeper into this and we did not try to sort of verify whether these are authentic or inauthentic players. Thank you for that. There's another question Rostow on the methods and the conclusions that you presented. The first one is just a comment that the ratio of posts that you have extracted in terms of looking at male and female political politicians accounts is quite important factor, plays a huge factor that Roshika has alluded to as well in drawing up conclusions. The second one is that did you find any instances of online violence perpetuated against female candidates or female politicians or MPs from the ruling party as well because there are certain like Roshika had mentioned certain nuances of ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status that does play a role in how people tend to attack female politicians or politicians in general as well. So where there are women from the ruling party, the fidget fist like Rosie Agbar, Pramila Kumar that faced some form of online balance or trolling. I will start with the second part of the question and I think we included those politicians and I think we came across some examples now. I cannot remember out of my top of my head. I mean, clearly those three cases which I mentioned in the presentations were clearly the most prominent ones but definitely, and I will perhaps make this some kind of announcement look for the report which is upcoming shortly. We are almost at the very final stage of this and we will make sure that these cases sort of will be mentioned there as well. So that's for this. And for the comment on the ratio. Oh, sure, sorry. Sorry, Rasta, let me just interject and clarify further on that first comment. We certainly included those two politicians that were mentioned. And in fact, we made sure that all female politicians from any party to be included as long as they have an active Facebook page because otherwise we won't be able to monitor. Thanks. Exactly, which is something that I already mentioned. And again, there was, I mean, this was not any sort of, let's say, criteria of choosing or not choosing. You know, we did not actually look at the actual sort of, I mean, who are these politicians representing? I mean, we were really, for us, the goal was really look at the cross section of political sort of environment. And so again, I will repeat it that the main criteria was that these politicians, as Abi mentioned, had active accounts and that was important obviously because otherwise we wouldn't be able to have access to these data. I mean, I take that point about the ratio, but again, I think here what is most important is really looking at the quality of this criteria. And so, you know, you can have, you can have, I mean, the fact that what came out of the study that we had perhaps male politicians facing more online violence was mainly because we looked at these different categories and we felt that, you know, when doing this research, it is important not only to look at, you know, I don't know, sexist language, but we felt that it's really important to look at these other aspects where perhaps, you know, it was clear that the male politicians were involved in more controversial sort of issues and perhaps that generated more responses from those commenters. And that should not somehow, you know, I think we can clearly see from the data that the presence of the problematic content is there. It doesn't really matter if it's 133 cases or 32 cases, there shouldn't be any case if I can put it this way. So, yes, thanks for these comments about the ratio, but here I think the most important fact is that, you know, this problematic content is present there and then it's important to dive in and then it's important to dive in and here again, you know, what I see as the main finding coming out of the research is that these problematic comments towards women politicians are in the sexist category and we did not find, I mean, we looked at the same category also for male politicians, but we did not see any content in that sense. Yeah, so we have to understand obviously the data in the complexity, but from my perspective, the ratio is not so important as, you know, when you look at the actual categories and what they found. So if maybe, sorry for a long response, but I thought it was important to explain this. Thank you, Rostow. Are there any more questions before we end this webinar? I'll probably just pose a question to Lausanne given that there is this research that is coming out soon to be published and there was another research that was done by the National Democratic Institute funded by USAID looking at violence against female politicians in Fiji and PNG and Solomon's, I think. So Lausanne, just what can the women's organizations or feminist organizations, what role do they play in ensuring that online forms of violence and in Fiji we've seen that online forms of violence does tend to reflect and as you've mentioned the offline sort of realities that women face. So is there something that is afoot in the for the upcoming 2022 elections that feminist or women's organizations can do to raise awareness around, you know, how to engage in a way that is respectful, how to identify, you know, sexist and sexist tones that is used online and how to better engage with female politicians online. Thank you. So for the women's organization and one of the things as well that I wanted to also raise is that as much as what the women's organization are doing and also the feminist organizations are doing in terms of building the capacity of women and really giving them all the tools and the resources it's the external factors that at times we cannot control. We have and we are planning to in build whatever information that we have received and especially with with these ongoing issues around women having to face this type of violence online. And this is generally something that we are working towards through the Fiji Women's Forum in planning towards what are some of the things that we can generate in terms of engaging with women that are planning to contest for the next elections. So plans are still underway and yes, this really has come in a very timely manner as well with the women's organization. We will now start to really in build and really prepare the women but it's really the external factors that is beyond our control that women themselves have to deal with whether it's online or offline. We can offer so much as we can in terms of building the capacity to be independent, to also really stand and find their footing as well when it comes to engaging in the community but then again, these are some of the things that we really cannot control. And also as I had already mentioned that given that there are really multiple factors as well with our community and our society being very patriarchal. Again, this is a fight that is still ongoing. And yeah, from the women's organization it's really just being our very best in terms of engaging with the women and making sure that the field out there is safe for them to participate in. Thank you. Are there any more questions that you'd like to ask or any comments you'd like to make? We've been told that the report will be released sometime in the second half of the year after early June of the first half towards the end. Any more questions? You can raise your hand, use the raise the hand emoji. I mean, we have Roshi Kadeo who stood for 2014 elections and there was stuff that she phased online and we have Lenora with us. If they'd like to share some of their own experiences in particular highlight some of the things that may be some strategies, coping strategies that they've used or things that maybe the report has not highlighted, she'd like to talk. I think I'll just add something as well in terms of the case around Linda was also that a lot of Linda Tambuia's case, a lot of things that were said offline were from her party members as well. So her own party members were questioning a lot of things around her modern characteristics of the modern ways in which she was dressing and all that stuff which perpetuated online through certain types of discussions around what an Indigenous woman in Parliament should wear or shouldn't wear how he or she should talk as well. So a lot of politicians even from the government side did perpetuate a lot of questionable, made a lot of questionable statements around that perpetuated a lot of online sort of conversations and violence and questionable behavior. Yeah, Romita, if I can just add a couple of comments, I won't be very long. I just wanted to say one of the things that I noticed from the findings of this scoping research was that how different it is to the 2014 interaction of people on social media with female politicians. There has been a lot of changes. And I think one of the reasons we see changes now in terms of how people react to female politicians is because there has been a lot of community education and awareness being done from 2014 to the 2018 until now and it's carrying on. And the other thing is also in terms of the affiliation of the female politicians. I think that if one is associated with a party structure, there's some level of protection, some level of political and social capital of the party that results in the protection of the female politician. So I think that is one factor. The other is the kind of issues that is part of your manifesto and agenda that also results in how the public or how social media users react. So if it's a lot of status quo, status quo campaigning, then there's less likely to be retaliation. Whereas if you're going against the status quo, you'll see a lot more higher and a lot more intense and a lot more violent reaction. And not only online, it also manifests offline in different spaces and in different ways and also your social status. So for instance, if you belong to a chiefly family or if you come from a political dynasty or if you have again the party backing and so forth, all of these variables impact the way a female politician is looked at how communities, the public react and interact with. So I think there's a lot more nuanced discussion that needs to be head around this issue. And that's why for me, the desegregation of the data is so important because it adds to that nuance given the complexity of our society and our culture. Thanks, Ramitesh. Thank you very much. If there's no more questions or comments from anyone here, we might come to a close. So thank you very much to everyone for joining in on a rainy, suvah afternoon. Thank you for Rastore for joining in early in the morning and to Endan and Loisana for coming in and providing their insights. And thank you for everyone and keep a lookout for international ideas upcoming webinars. Have a good afternoon. Stay safe and we'll see you next week. Thank you very much. Thank you.