CPWO Research Seminar
Understanding and Addressing Online Harms Against Women and Girls through Research
Online spaces play a huge role in our everyday lives, offering connection, creativity, and community. Yet for many women and girls, these spaces can also bring real risks and harm. These Research Seminars open up a shared conversation about how research can help us understand these experiences and find practical ways to make digital spaces safer and more inclusive. Bringing together researchers, students, practitioners, and members of the wider community, the event is an opportunity to learn from one another, share insights, and explore how we can work collectively to create lasting change.
We are delighted to welcome Asia Eaton to lead this Research Seminar. Further details about the talk, the speaker’s biography, and a link to book a place are provided below.
Platforms as Crime Scene, Judge, and Jury
Image-based sexual abuse is a form of sexual violence that lives on online platforms. Victim-survivors must turn to those same platforms to make it stop. This talk presents findings from two complementary studies of NCII reporting in the U.S. In an audit of X (formerly Twitter), we posted 50 AI-generated nude images and reported them under two mechanisms: 25 under the platform’s non-consensual nudity policy, and 25 under DMCA copyright. The DMCA reports achieved a 100% removal rate within 25 hours; the non-consensual nudity reports achieved 0% over three weeks. In a second study, trauma-informed interviews with 13 victim-survivors revealed how platform reporting processes are hostile, opaque, and ineffective, constituting what we identify as institutional betrayal. Together, the studies show that platforms have the capacity to act, but they have chosen not to deploy it for the people who need it most. I will close with concrete design and policy directions, including implications of the recently enacted TAKE IT DOWN Act in the U.S.
About the Speaker
Dr. Asia Eaton is a Professor of Psychology at Florida International University (FIU) and interim Executive Director of Mindbridge, the nation’s leading non-profit using brain and behavioral science to empower human rights defenders. Her research explores how gender intersects with identities such as race, sexual orientation, and class to affect individuals access to and experience with power. Since 2016 Asia has also served as Head of Research for Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), which is working to understand and end the epidemic of image-based sexual abuse in the U.S. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, featured in outlets like the New York Times, Forbes, Science Magazine, and BBC News, and resulted in invited talks at the White House, the U.N., Meta, Google, the Korean Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, the U.S. Marines Corp, and universities around the globe. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association in Divisions 9 and 35, and has won national awards for research, teaching/mentoring, and leadership/service.
