Activists from around the world are drawing attention to the harassment they have faced on Meta platforms. More than 90 percent of land and environmental defenders surveyed by Global Witness, a nonprofit organization that also tracks killings of environmental defenders, reported experiencing some sort of online abuse or harassment related to their work. Facebook was the most frequently mentioned platform, followed by X, WhatsApp and Instagram.
Global Witness and many of the activists interviewed call on Meta and its peers to do more to combat harassment and disinformation on their platforms. They fear that if left unchecked, online attacks could exacerbate the risks to activists in the real world. About 75 percent of those surveyed said they believe that the online abuse they have experienced corresponds to harm in real life.
“This statistic gave me no peace of mind. It was so much higher than we expected,” Ava Lee, head of digital threats campaign strategy at Global Witness, tells The Verge. And this is despite expectations of a gloomy outcome based on previous anecdotal evidence. “It’s long been known that the online experience of climate activists and environmentalists is pretty terrible,” says Lee.
Between November 2024 and March of this year, Global Witness interviewed more than 200 people who had been contacted through the same networks it uses to document the killings of land and environmental defenders. It found that Meta-owned platforms were the “most toxic.” Some 62% of participants said they had experienced abuse on Facebook, 36% on WhatsApp, and 26% on Instagram.
This probably reflects the popularity of Meta platforms around the world. Facebook has more than 3 billion monthly active users, which is more than a third of the world’s population. But in January, Meta also abandoned its third-party fact-checking program, which critics say could lead to an increase in hate speech and misinformation. Meta has moved to a crowdsourced approach to content moderation, similar to X, where 37% of survey respondents reported having experienced abuse.
In May, Meta reported a “slight increase in the prevalence of bullying and harassment content” on Facebook, as well as a “slight increase in the prevalence of violent and graphic content” during the first quarter of 2025.
“There’s also a certain irony in this: they’re moving towards a model of free speech that we’ve seen silence certain voices,” says Hannah Sharp, senior campaigner at Global Witness.
Fatrisia Ain leads a local women’s collective on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, where she says palm oil companies have seized farmland and polluted a river from which local villagers get their drinking water. Facebook posts accuse her of being a communist, which is a dangerous accusation in her country, she tells The Verge.
The practice of “red-labeling” – calling anyone who dissents a communist – is used to harass and criminalize activists in Southeast Asia. In one high-profile case, a prominent environmental activist in Indonesia was imprisoned under “anti-communist” laws after she opposed the construction of a new gold mine.
Ain says she asked Facebook to remove several posts attacking her, but to no avail. “They said it’s not dangerous, so they can’t remove it. It is dangerous. I hope that Meta will realize that it is dangerous in Indonesia,” says Ain.
Other publications accuse Ain of trying to defraud farmers and of having an affair with a married man, which she sees as attempts to discredit her, which could lead to even greater threats in a real world that is already hostile to her activism. “Women who are defenders of my own community are more vulnerable than men…more people harass you with many things,” she says.
Nearly two-thirds of people who responded to a Global Witness survey said they feared for their safety, including Ain. She has been physically targeted during protests against palm oil companies accused of not paying farmers, she tells The Verge. She says that during a protest outside a government office, men grabbed her buttocks and breasts. Now that she leads protests, older female activists surround her to protect her as a security measure.
In a Global Witness survey, nearly a quarter of respondents said they had been attacked on the basis of their gender. “There’s evidence that women and women of color, particularly in politics, experience far more hatred than any other group,” says Lee. “Again, we see this manifesting itself when it comes to human rights defenders… and the threats of sexual violence and the impact that this has on the mental health of many of them and their ability to feel safe.”
“We encourage people to use the tools available on our platforms to help protect themselves from bullying and harassment,” Meta spokeswoman Tracy Clayton said in an email to The Verge, adding that the company is reviewing the Facebook posts that targeted Ain. Meta also pointed to its Hidden Words feature, which allows you to filter out offensive direct messages and comments on your posts, as well as its Restrictions feature, which hides comments on your posts from users who are not your followers.
Other companies mentioned in the report, including Google, TikTok, and X, did not provide official responses to The Verge’s inquiries. Nor did a palm oil company, which Ain says operates on local farmers’ land without paying them as required by a mandatory profit-sharing scheme.
Global Witness argues that there are concrete steps that social media companies can take to combat harassment on their platforms. These include allocating more resources to content moderation systems, regularly reviewing these systems, and involving the public in the process. The activists interviewed also said that they believe that algorithms that facilitate the spread of polarizing content and the proliferation of bots on platforms are making the problem worse.
“Platforms have a few choices they can make,” Li said. “Resources are a choice, and they could invest more money in really good content moderation and really good trust and security [initiatives] to improve the situation.”
Global Witness plans to release its next report on the killings of land and environmental defenders in September. The organization’s latest report shows that at least 196 people were killed in 2023.
