20 Policy Brief No. 22 Toda Peace Institute/Alliance for Peacebuilding information on 50 million Facebook users before the 2016 US election. Just as ISIS uses social media with the intent of recruiting new members, so do political candidates, including those with the intent of undermining democracy. "Persuading somebody to vote in a certain way is really very similar to persuading a 14- to 25-year-old boy in Indonesia to not join Al Qaeda." (Bashyakarla 2018) Political actors project mass propaganda and micro-targeted propaganda aimed at specific psychological profiles to sway elections. 37. Harassing and Threatening Journalists, Minorities, and Government Critics. Governments use social media to harass and repress journalists. Filipino President Duterte’s authoritarian approach to governing includes the use of “patriotic trolling” by “troll armies” of fake accounts that harass journalists and critics of the regime. (Etter, Silver and Frier 2017) In India, Prime Minister Modi’s troll armies threaten political opponents and journalists critiquing antiMuslim policies. Russia and China censor and remove posts aimed at mobilizing social movements or expressing grievances against the government. Instagram (owned by Facebook) agreed to a Russian government request to block the website of opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny. (Troianovski 2018) Social media platforms do not publish the rules for what content they deem inappropriate and what they will remove. Minority groups assert that there appear to be different standards in use for minority groups. For example, Facebook did not remove a Facebook post from a Louisiana Congressional Representative who called for identifying and killing all "radicalized" Muslims in the US, but removed a Facebook post and disabled the account of an African American activist who posted a comment noting that all white people are racist. (Angwin and Grassegger 2017) 38. Tolerating Gendered Online Harassment. Female journalists and bloggers face an alarming amount of online abuse on all social media platforms, including threats of murder, rape, and violent attacks via email and comment sections. (Mijatović 2016) Amnesty International found that 1 in 5 women has experienced online abuse and threats, and that many report stress, anxiety, or panic attacks as a result of harmful online experiences. In 2017, the hashtag, #WomenBoycottTwitter aimed to expose how Twitter failed to apply its community standards and remove content including threats of rape and death to women using Twitter. (Amnesty International 2017) The Sri Lankan Center for Policy Alternatives found in their research that Facebook pages include a culture of misogyny and impunity enjoyed by the oftenanonymous perpetrators of online violence. This included frequent incidents of sexual harassment, non-consensual dissemination of intimate images and other forms of technology-related violence against women and girls that even when reported to Facebook, are not removed. (Center for Policy Alternatives 2018) The University of Maryland found that those with female usernames in online chatrooms experienced threats 25 times more often than those with male or