WTM9JA: Women Online Safety Hackathon
Cyberbullies can hide behind a mask of anonymity online and do not need direct physical access to their victims to do unimaginable harm.
-Anna Maria Chavez
The statistics of women being victims of online harassment keep rising exponentially especially during the period of Covid-19. Women’s rights charity survey data shows that Covid-19 has seen women experience an upsurge in online sexual harassment whilst working from home, as harassers take advantage of online work platforms and social media during the pandemic.
This is a frightening situation that needs quick intervention to prevent women from psychological traumas and mental breakdowns. Moreover, a lot of processes need to be in place for us to curb the rate of online harassment experienced especially by the female gender.
Thanks to Women Techmakers (WTM) for having good foresight in looking into ways by which this can be tackled. In collaboration with JIGSAW Company, they were able to provide an avenue for us to pitch ideas to solve online safety problems like Doxxing(revelation of personally identifiable information (PII) with the intent to harm the target), Cyberstalking(use of the internet or other electronic means to stalk or harass an individual), Malicious distribution of Images, and also to provide tools for tackling harassment. The hackathon had different selection stages and luckily my team amongst others made it to the final stage.
One of the efficient ways of curbing some of the online safety problems previously listed is by tackling them through Allies which could be Law enforcement platforms (Police Stations, Human Right Law Firms, Human rights NGOs) in this case.
On the 14th of August, 2021, My team (Team ZPR) pitched a solution called SafeCyber. SafeCyber is an AI-enabled webpage for victims to report cases of online harassment and also to get the attacker arrested. SafeCyber helps to automate the following steps;
- Documenting the harassment: SafeCyber platform enables victims to report the case of harassment online through the use of a Web App for investigation, validation, and recording purposes.
- Suggestions of the kind of actions to be taken: SafeCyber platform uses a machine-learning classifier model to classify data fed by the victims. The model helps to classify the data into different categories of harassment and also suggests either legal actions or legislative actions to ally organizations based on the category of harassment reported.
Some of the technologies used in implementing the SafeCyber platform are;
- Web App Frontend- HTML, CSS & Bootstrap
- ML Model Classifier- Python, Tensorflow
- Web App Backend - Flask, SQLAlchemy
- Web deployment- Heroku
It was indeed a wonderful experience at WTM9ja Online Safety Hackathon. Asides from pitching a solution at the hackathon, I also learned many other things about online safety such as keeping personal information limited, blocking contacts that feel unsafe, and also protecting my identity online. Permit me to add that my team also won, we took 3rd position🤭.
Special thanks to WTM9ja and also to my team members(Kolawole Precious and Racheal Olomo).
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