More than 200 high-profile women, including Australian former prime minister Julia Gillard, actors Emma Watson, Thandie Newton, and tennis player Billie Jean King, have signed an open letter to chief executives of Facebook, Google, TikTok, and Twitter asking for concrete actions to tackle abuse on social media platforms.

The letter, published at the UN Generation Equality Forum, has asked the social media platforms to “urgently prioritise the safety of women” on their platforms.

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The letter also quoted a 2020 study, by The Economist Intelligence Unit on more than 4,000 adult women, that found that 38% of the women in 51 nations have had experienced online intimidation.

“The internet is the town square of the 21st Century. It is where debate takes place, communities are built, products are sold and reputations are made. But the scale of online abuse means that, for too many women, these digital town squares are unsafe. This is a threat to progress on gender equality,” reads the letter, as quoted by BBC. 

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The letter also emphasises that online abuse is worse for marginalised groups, black, Asian, Latin American, and mixed-race women.

The social media platform’s chiefs have said they will commit to improving systems on reporting abuse, adding that they will filter what users see and who can interact with them on their sites.

While TikToh has added a prompt that asks people to reconsider the impact of their words in a comment with inappropriate or other keywords, Facebook has announced a Women’s Safety Hub to centralise its existing resources to deal with online abuse. Mark Zuckerberg’s platform will also dedicate a global Women’s Safety Advisory board to monitor and make safety recommendations.

Meanwhile, to tackle abuses online, Twitter has features that limit the posts people see. However, the platform knows ” there is still much work to be done,” and it is “committed to addressing this issue.”