According to Nyamwire, women politicians barely used Twitter for campaigning. While women extensively used Facebook, many of their accounts were set up as personal pages instead of Public Figure pages that politicians typically use to engage large audiences, she says this is why they have resolved to have them trained.
Guidelines on how women leaders can safely juggle social media
has been launched.
This comes after a study by feminist organization POLLICY
found Ugandan female politicians use social media far less than their male
counterparts, linking it partly to abuse they experience across platforms.
Dubbed the Women Curriculum, the new guidelines give tips on
how to be secure on-line in addition to training women to draft messages that
suit different media platforms and how to respond to attacks.
Bonnita Nyamwire who heads research at POLLICY Uganda told
Uganda Radio Network - URN that before they came up with the document, they did a needs assessment and
interviewed women to understand their digital needs right from the members of
parliament to lower level political offices at the local councils.
//Cue in: “We don’t want ………
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Initially, she says they are piloting the curriculum among women
who have been picked from Kampala, Wakiso, Kabale and Mbale districts.
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Pollicy monitored 202 Twitter and Facebook accounts where 101
belonged to men and 101 women politicians six weeks before and after the 2021
elections. At 50%, they found women
experience online violence in the forms of trolling, body shaming, sexualized
and gendered insults, and gendered disinformation on both Twitter and Facebook
and yet their male counterparts experiences attacks related to their inability
to perform leadership roles.
According to Nyamwire, women politicians barely used Twitter
for campaigning. While women extensively
used Facebook, many of their accounts were set up as personal pages instead of
Public Figure pages that politicians typically use to engage large audiences,
she says this is why they have resolved to have them trained.
//Cue in:” Most of the ……………
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Commenting about the curriculum, Mary Harriet Lamunu the
Executive Director of the Uganda Women Parliamentary Association (UWOPA) said this
has come in handy with the trend now tending towards having social media
handlers which is an extra cost to women for something that they can easily
control.
She acknowledged having reviewed all the areas highlighted in
the curriculum for digital safety to content creation and creating writing which
says are the problems keeping women away.
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On her part, Olive Namazzi, the LC IV Councilor Nakawa
Division who attended the launch said she deals with sexist attacks on social
media all the time. She says at some
point, she felt like creating a pseudo account so that she could respond to
untruths labelled against her on-line.
Like her, Kabale Mayor Maclean Kamusiime said at the height
of the campaigns last year, she had to respond to an attacker on Facebook who
claimed that it’s because of her political aspirations that her husband had to
marry a second wife.
“I commented and said is it new? If it is new, go write a
book about it”, she told the meeting that she doesn’t regret this reply since
after that a lot of women stormed her inbox confessing similar attacks.
For such women even at a level of political leader, Samantha
Mwesigye a lawyer said they need psychosocial support because sometimes they
experience mental break down.
