The outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic last year not only affected people healthwise but economically, psychologically and in many other ways. Speaking of its various negative impacts, the Team lead for ‘Get Her in Digitalk’, Gifty Asamoah, has shared some negative impacts that Covid-19 had on women digitally.
Interviewed on the ladies’ talk show, Girl Vibes which is aired on eTV Ghana and hosted by the Ekumfi Princess, Mercy Bee, Gifty stated that one of the major problems that women faced with having to go digital following the Coronavirus outbreak is cyberbullying.
“Last year drew everyone to the internet. Whether you knew how to go about it or not, that was the primary way of communicating so a lot of women and girls were online and there were a lot of cyberbullying cases recorded. That is from a UN women’s report that came out last year.
A lot of women were online because most of them had nothing to do and with Twitter for instance, if you post something, you might get trolled. Everyone was online and you can’t stop anyone from posting or saying what they want so when you post something, they come for you and that prevented a lot of women from expressing themselves as they should”, she explained.
According to Gifty, this also affected women’s businesses in some way because some of them were scared of getting interactive on social media as they did not want to become the next trending topic probably due to a typographical error or something else.
The digital expert disclosed that with the digital world being her field of work, she and her team did some research about the laws protecting women against cyberbullying and unfortunately, they do not work as effectively as they should.
By: Maureen Dedei Quaye