Online abuse against female journalists: A scoping review

Abstract

The Internet and digital technologies have delivered countless benefits to journalism. However, they also raised new opportunities to attack journalists with impunity, especially female journalists, impacting their credibility and affecting women's public participation. This chapter draws on feminist thinking and presents a review of impactful research on online abuse against female journalists published in the last decade in the Web of Science database. To provide a quantitative and qualitative assessment of relevant literature on the subject, we combined a meta-analysis with content analysis. Results show the relative increasing importance of the issue and the recognition of widespread abuse toward female professionals, despite the phenomenon's detrimental normalisation. The research also offers critical insights into the cross-contextual – online and offline – of the harmful practices and how to counter online abuse and improve the democratic potential of public conversation. Nevertheless, further studies are needed to fully understand this phenomenon' nature, prevalence, and impact on democratic societies.