Online abuse and hate speech targeting politically active women in Afghanistan has significantly increased since the Taliban took over the country in August 2021, according to a report released on November 20 by a U.K.-based rights group. Afghan Witness, an open-source project run by the nonprofit Center for Information Resilience, says it found that abusive posts tripled, a 217 percent increase, between June-December 2021 and the same period of 2022. The report said the team of investigators "collected and analyzed over 78,000 posts" written in Dari and Pashto directed at "almost 100 accounts of politically active Afghan women."
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