These demands follow the release of a report revealing how hate speech and harassment have escalated on Facebook and Instagram since Meta weakened protections.
Arisha Hatch, the interim executive director of the women’s advocacy group UltraViolet, condemned the verdict as “a stain on a criminal justice system that for decades has failed to hold accountable abusers” and called it “an indictment of a culture in which not believing women and victims of sexual assault remains endemic.”
Shaunna Thomas, the cofounder of UltraViolet, a women’s advocacy organization, vehemently disagrees [with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell]. “Until we came along,” she says, “the confirmation was a done deal.” Her six-year-old group has embraced bird-dogging as well as media-friendly gestures like flying a thank you christine banner over Christine Blasey Ford’s house in Palo Alto. UltraViolet’s activity surged during the Kavanaugh hearings, Thomas says. At Senator Susan Collins’s office in Portland, Maine, “hundreds of people started showing up. First weekly, then daily.”