Digital Self Care

Digital self care is a strategy to set digital boundaries, empower victims and reduce the harm caused by online abuse. Digital self care can help increase resilience and reduce the impact of abuse to both the victim and other women who are considering getting involved in political activities.

Steps that parties could do to promote digital self care include giving information or training to members about:

• How to block abusive accounts, set privacy settings, turn off location and mute notifications.
• Being aware of the terms of use of platforms you use and how to report abusive messages
• Using long, strong unique passwords and/or two factor authentication
• How to blur backgrounds and remove items or tags that might give away personal information

People sometimes receive abuse due to being tagged in other people’s posts or comments. Party communications teams could consider limiting the amount they tag individual candidates and representatives in party social media posts, or receiving explicit permission before they do so. This may help to limit the amount of abusive messages women see in their timeline.

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