Women journalists in the pandemics of digital hate: A time where less is more

Abstract

Digital platforms quickly became prevalent over physical public space, allowing debates, interactions, and activism to flourish. With women journalists contributing significantly to the formation of a vibrant digital public space, offline violence has adapted and evolved with digital platforms. Since 2015, the safety of journalists has profiled as an object of research in the field of communication sciences. Researchers identify, explore, and analyze the nature, prevalence, mediums of support and impacts, both personal and journalistic, of new aggressions specific to the digital environment, which aim to discredit, condition, and silence female participation. However, the wide diversity of terms and definitions used by academics has made it difficult to identify the phenomenon of digital violence against journalists and what would be the appropriate way to legislate it, to guarantee a protection of rights adapted to the digital environment. Based on scientific papers that have carried out a systematic review of terms used in previous research to characterize digital violence against women journalists, we intend to identify the best way to conceptually characterize the phenomenon and which issues need to be considered for a legislation of journalists' safety in digital arena.