DW Akademie Study Safer platforms, stronger participation
Northwest Syria highlights that blackmail is among the
most commonly reported technology-facilitated harms
and is reinforced by limited digital literacy, weak response
pathways, and shame-based community reactions
(ACAPS, 2025). In practice, the economic dimension matters: financial pressure can both motivate perpetrators and
constrain survivors’ ability to seek help, relocate, change
devices, or pursue legal routes.
At the more organized end of the spectrum are perpetrators operating through coordinated networks, sometimes
linked to political, sectarian, or ideological divides. Here,
GBVO functions less as personal hostility and more as a
tactic to punish dissent, deter participation, and shape
narratives about legitimacy and belonging. This is supported by journalist IDIs describing “organized campaigns”
tied to sect/religion dynamics and by survivor accounts
describing silencing tactics by political/sectarian groups.
Coordinated attacks often carry recognizable features:
synchronized posting, repeated phrases, amplification
by pages or groups, and the rapid spread of defamatory
claims across multiple spaces. This pattern mirrors global
findings that online violence against women in public roles
frequently intersects with disinformation tactics designed
to silence and discredit (Posetti et al., 2020).
Across these categories, motivations consistently
converge around a small set of drivers:
1.
2.
Disciplining women’s visibility and enforcing norms
about who can speak evidenced in multiple women’s
IDIs linking targeting to recognizability and public
presence, and KIIs describing women as strategically
“easier” to discredit through stigma.
Punishing political or social opinions framed as
betrayal, “dishonor”, or “threats” to community identity: survivor IDIs, especially men, and journalist IDIs
describing attacks connected to contested public
issues and polarization.
3. Extracting economic gain through blackmail: evidenced in survivor accounts describing blackmail
attempts and KIIs identifying economic motivation.
4. Revenge and interpersonal retaliation: evidenced in
survivor IDIs describing intentional harm/revenge
motives and FGDs noting perpetrators can be known
to survivors.
5. Structural impunity, reinforced by low reporting, limited
enforcement capacity, and weak platform moderation,
acts as an enabling condition across all perpetrator
types, reducing deterrence and allowing attacks to
recur as a routine feature of the digital environment,
consistent with KIIs explicitly linking the problem to
the absence of legal deterrents.
This also clarifies the “structural role” of perpetrators in
Syria’s online space: regardless of individual motive, the
cumulative effect is to reproduce gendered hierarchies
and shrink civic participation. Perpetrators, including
loosely coordinated groups, become informal enforcers
of social control, signaling to women that public engagement will carry a reputational and psychological cost, and
to others that women’s exclusion is acceptable or even
justified.
4.4 Platforms and
channels of GBVO
GBVO occurs across social media platforms, messaging applications, and online media comment sections.
However, different platforms facilitate different forms of
abuse, such as Telegram for coordination, Facebook for
public smear campaigns, and WhatsApp for personal
blackmailing.
4.4.1 Cross-platforms escalation patterns
Women survivors described heightened fear in private
channels, while media professionals explained how
platforms are used strategically:
Telegram is used to coordinate attacks, then
Facebook is used to spread them.
KII — Media professional
FGD participants noted the role of public comment sections on social media pages as being very intensive in
targeting women if they have public profiles or as speakers
on public pages.
Platform affordances, anonymity, weak moderation, and
amplification combine with gendered vulnerability to
shape exposure and harm.
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