Amnesty International Joins the Fainting-Couch Feminists

Amnesty International USA has launched a new campaign called Troll Patrol, which is described as a crowd-sourced program for tracking online abuse of women. This is evidently their top campaign now since it's the first thing you see when you go to their Web site. Yet nowhere do they explain why they think only women deserve protection from online abuse. Nor do they even claim that women experience more such abuse than men, either in the email announcing the campaign or in the page to which it links.

I wrote them:

Why are you only compiling data on abuse against women? Don't men have human rights too? The page you link to doesn't even claim that women experience more abuse than men -- it just ignores the question as if abuse of men doesn't matter.

 

Further, you don't explain on what basis you intend to differentiate real abuse, such as credible physical threats, from statements that can at most hurt someone's feelings. It seems very odd that an organization that has always been supposed to stand for human rights now seems intent on limiting freedom of expression, and in a way that infantilizes women at the same time.

 

Can we say "sexism"?

 

Their response:

Thank you for taking the time to write to us. We fight for the rights for all people in all places, including when women can't express themselves freely and suffer harassment, abuse, and violence -- psychological violence is one of those. Threatening to rape someone is not covered in free speech and we have seen that this is especially dangerous in places where there are fewer protections for human rights defenders.

To read the full report on this issue, please visit: https://www.amnestyusa.org/reports/online-abuse-of-women-thrives-as-twitter-fails-to-respect-womens-rights/.

Best,

Samantha Putri

Member Services Assistant

Amnesty International USA

Note that nowhere does Ms. Putri answer the question of why only abuse of women should be addressed, nor does she even claim that it happens to women more often. Also notable is that while she highlights rape threats, AI's communications about this program to members and supporters are much broader and vaguer about what would be tracked, while apparently keeping tight control of these decisions in the hands of the organization rather than leaving them to the judgment of "Troll Patrol" participants. Supporters are evidently expected to do drudge work for the organization and simply trust that it will employ their efforts in a reasonable way, even though the program's gender-biased framing suggests otherwise.

In response, I'm starting a petition on Change.Org calling on Amnesty International USA and its Executive Director, Margaret Huang, to either end this program or extend it to include people of all genders, while making the process for judging abuse transparent.