Nadeen Ashraf
Credit: © Omar Allam, American University in Cairo

March is Women’s History Month, an annual observance of women’s achievements and contributions to society. This month, Behind the Headlines will feature woman pioneers in a variety of areas. 

Social media websites are often used for such activities as connecting with friends and family or sharing your singing, dancing, or cooking skills. But social media can also serve as platforms for promoting change, be it in politics, race relations, or gender equality. Nadeen Ashraf, an Egyptian feminist and activist against sexual assault, started the account Assault Police on the social media service Instagram. The account has drawn large numbers of women to share information about sexual assault and harassment, along with their personal experiences.

Ashraf was born March 12, 1998, in Cairo. From a young age, she had an interest in the internet and social media. She started Assault Police while studying philosophy at the American University in Cairo. Other students had posted online about a man who was sexually harassing and threatening women. When one of their accounts suddenly disappeared, Ashraf became angry. In July 2020, she created Assault Police to repost the allegations. The account quickly drew thousands of followers, and the man was soon arrested.

Many more women were drawn to share their experiences on Assault Police. Ashraf’s work helped inspire a broader discussion about sexual violence in the conservative country. Egyptian officials have traditionally been reluctant to prosecute crimes against women, and witnesses and victims may be charged with indecency upon coming forward. In a poll conducted by the United Nations in 2013, 99 percent of Egyptian women reported witnessing sexual assault or harassment. A 2017 study found Cairo to be the most dangerous large city for women, in part due to sexual assault and harassment.

The movement sparked in part by Ashraf has been compared to the MeToo social movement in Western countries. In August 2020, Egypt’s parliament passed a law to shield the identity of harassment victims.

January 18, 2018

In October 2017, claims of sexual harassment and misconduct among certain Hollywood personalities led to the explosion of a global social media movement known as Me Too. Also known by its internet hashtag #MeToo, the movement is a forum for victims of sexual assault to tell their personal experiences. The recent Me Too movement joined a similar movement of the same name that began years earlier. The vast numbers associated with #MeToo—the hashtag has been used millions of times on social media—have revealed the widespread problem of sexual harassment around the world. Through Me Too, millions of women—and men—have come forward to help ease the pain and guilt often felt by victims of sexual assault.

The Me Too movement began in 2006 and exploded on the social media scene in 2017. Credit: © Mihai Surdu, Shutterstock

Me Too was originally begun in 2006 by civil rights activist Tarana Burke to organize women of color against sexual abuse. Burke was inspired to use the phrase after being unable to respond to a young girl who confided to her that she had been sexually assaulted. Burke later wished she had simply told the girl, “me too.” Burke worked quietly on the issue for years, and is now senior director for Brooklyn’s Girls for Gender Equity (GGE), a nonprofit organization committed to the physical, psychological, social, and economic development of girls and women.

In 2017, as news broke of widespread sexual abuse in Hollywood, actress Alyssa Milano (unaware of Burke’s existing movement) wrote on Twitter, “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” The combined Me Too forces created a worldwide forum for victims of sexual abuse. Numerous Hollywood celebrities have been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior through Me Too, as have many people in government, the media and music industries, and other highly visible occupations.

Time magazine named the “silence breakers” of the #MeToo movement as the magazine’s collective Person of the Year for 2017. Sexual assault victims who speak out are silence breakers because many people keep quiet about the experience which caused them psychological and perhaps physical harm. The negative consequences of speaking out can be daunting, and often the perpetrators of sexual assault go unpunished.

Beyond the Me Too movement, sexual abuse scandals in churches, schools, and athletic organizations have emerged in numerous places, most recently in Australia, Chile, India, and the United States. The World Health Organization estimates that one in three women in the world has experienced sexual violence.

April 24, 2013

A false tweet from the Associated Press (AP),  one of the largest and most trusted news-gathering services in the world, created panic on Wall Street for a brief time yesterday. Computer hackers entered AP’s Twitter account and sent a false message stating that the White House had been bombed and that President Obama was injured. It took AP’s staff almost no time to spot and correct the tweet, but the damage was done. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, an index that tracks prices on the stock exchange for  30 major firms, fell 143 points in a matter of minutes. Such a quick and steep drop in stock prices is sometimes known as a flash crash. The market soon recovered once the truth was known, but the panic pointed to recent problems with the use of social media as a news source.

Twitter users post short messages, called tweets, that must be less than 140 characters long. This image shows a section of World Book's Twitter profile page. A profile page collects and displays a user's recent tweets. (© Twitter)

Twitter accounts have been hacked with greater frequency in 2013, especially accounts belonging to news organizations. In March, a group claiming to be supporters of Syria’s beleaguered President Bashar Assad gained control of Twitter accounts belonging to the United Kingdom news organization, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). On April 15, National Public Radio (NPR) discovered that some of their Twitter accounts had been hacked by the same group, who also claimed responsibility for yesterday’s incident on AP’s Twitter account. Reuters (Thomson Reuters) and al-Jazeera had also been targeted.

Twitter has begun working on a new security system that will prevent hackers from being able to break into an account, even if they have the passwords for that account. That new system has yet to be released. Further, it does not address the issue of how quickly information can be disseminated on social media, whether false or true. The issue there concerns readers believing and reacting to reports so quickly.

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