Popular social media services urged to adopt safety system against online anti-women abuse in Urdu, Punjabi

It is high time globally popular social media services realised their utmost moral responsibility of adopting an effective mechanism to keep the discourses on these platforms free from abusive and profane language in Urdu and Punjabi extensively used against women in India and Pakistan.

This was one of the consensus recommendations of a national webinar on “SafeWords: Combating Sexist Abuse in Urdu and Punjabi”, organised by the Uks Research Centre on Thursday.

The webinar was organised to present the findings of extensive research, compilation, and campaigning work by the Uks Research Centre to ensure that social media platforms are free of online abuse in Urdu and Punjabi languages targeting women.

The speakers at the webinar strongly suggested that popular social media services with a strong regional presence including X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and TikTok, should introduce online filters to instantly detect and delete most of the anti-women profanity words in Urdu and Punjabi on these platforms.

They were of the view that these filters should act in the same robust manner as the stringent digital safety mechanism in place by these social media platforms against the global menace of hate speech to ensure that online services protect the dignity and honour of vulnerable communities across the world. They recommended that online safety systems should ensure instant penal action against those freely resorting to the use of anti-women abusive language in Urdu and Punjabi.

The participants of the webinar said the utterly unchecked use of foul language in Urdu and Punjabi on social media platforms daily affected a massive number of women both in Pakistan and India because of the widespread use of the two languages across the border.

They said Pakistan could provide real-time digital support from a trained workforce of volunteers associated with concerned non-profits and NGOs to help these global social media services purge them of Urdu and Punjabi abusive words.

Uks Research Centre Executive Director Tasneem Ahmar said her concerned think tank was about to compile a compendium to let the public know about the pervasive online use of abusive language in Urdu and Punjabi targeting women.

She told the participants of the webinar that the compendium had been compiled and an extensive social media campaign was conducted to let a large number of people come out of their state of utter denial that this issue of language abuse didn’t exist on online platforms.

Ahmar said the research work by Uks had found that the issue of profane language had been targeting female social media users from every section of society, and this issue of online abuse wasn’t just confined to high-profile women like show business celebrities and politicians.

She reiterated the firm resolve of her think tank to continue working with relevant state and government agencies, including the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, to ensure that social media services are completely safe and secured online platforms for Pakistani women from all socio-economic backgrounds.

Ahmar said that the next phases of the Uks campaign against online abuse of women would cover schools, colleges, and mainstream media institutions, especially private TV channels, so that a larger section of society, especially youth, could be sensitised about this issue.

Injie Anis and Shahrezad Samiuddin, who both were involved in the compilation of the compendium comprising Urdu and Punjabi abusive words used on online platforms, told the participants of the webinar that variant spellings of the profane words and extensive use of Roman Urdu for writing foul language on digital media platforms were the two main challenges while tackling this issue.

They said the groundbreaking research work by Uks could be replicated in any part of the world to ensure the online safety of women regardless of their ethnic, cultural, and linguistic association.

They said the compendium comprising profane words being compiled by Uks would go a long way in helping social media platforms introduce safety mechanisms against the Urdu and Punjabi abusive language for the online safety of women.

Senior journalist and social activist Aafia Salam suggested that owing to the cross-border linguistic similarity, the relevant non-profits and think tanks in India and Pakistan should collaborate to jointly tackle the issue of online abuse as women in both countries were equally affected by this menacing problem.

Areeba Fatima, another webinar participant, said that popular social media platforms like X and Facebook could develop monitoring systems to check online language abuse in Urdu and Punjabi if they got real-time linguistic assistance from concerned Pakistani NGOs.