Violent and sexualised hate speech targeting women journalists (South Africa)

Global Witness and South Africa's Legal Resources Centre submitted 40 advertisements — ten each in English, Afrikaans, Xhosa and Zulu — containing violent, sexualised hate speech targeting women journalists to Meta, TikTok, X and YouTube. The ads, based on real abuse documented against women journalists, described women as vermin or psychopaths and called for them to be beaten or killed; all submissions were withdrawn before publication.

Meta and TikTok approved all 40 ads within 24 hours. YouTube also approved all 40, though 21 were flagged by automated review with a "limited" status while still being deemed suitable for some audiences. X approved all but two English-language ads, which it halted from publication. TikTok later said its automated system had correctly flagged the ads as policy violations but that a human moderator overturned that decision in error; Meta acknowledged the ads breached its rules, while Google and X did not respond.

The investigation's authors describe the near-uniform approval across platforms and languages as evidence that current automated and human moderation processes are not adequate to catch severe, clearly identifiable violations of platforms' own hate-speech policies.