iWatch Africa

2021

Country/area: Ghana

Organisation: Citinewsroom.com, Ghanaweb.com, ModernGhana.com, Newsghana.com and all major news networks in Ghana.

Organisation size: Small

Publication date: 27 Jul 2020

Credit: Gideon Sarpong, Moro Seidu, Henry Kyeremeh and 10 members of our online abuse tracking team.

Project description:

The project relied on collating primary data on online abuses directed at journalists and rights activists in Ghana. The report highlights the top ten most abused journalists in Ghana, the forms of abuse, gender distribution and patforms where the abuse happens.

Impact reached:

A petition was submitted to the Ghana Police Service based on the primary data of abuses collected as part of this report. The police has promised to carry out the necesary investigations on the abuses and harassments that bothers on criminality.

A guideline for prevention of online abuse was developed by iWatch Africa in cordination with the Commission on Human Rights Abuse and Administrative Justice in Ghana as a report of the report.

The report brought up the issue of online violence to the top of the agenda in Ghana with over 5000 mentions on Twitter and radio and TV discussions.

iWatch Africa team was invited to speak about our report during the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa 2020 (#FIFAfrica20) organised by CIPESA and Paradign Inititaive.

Journalists now are able to reach us directly when abused and we have also set up a team that tracks and reports online abuses in real time.

Techniques/technologies used:

Our tracking team relied heavily on tweetdeck to track abuses in the twitter sphere.

We also relied on google forms, sheets to report all track abuses.

We relied on excel apps to analyse data and design our infographics.

What was the hardest part of this project?

The hardest part of his project was analysing all the data gathered by our team over a three month period across the major digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Instagram.