Sports journalists’ safety in the face of online harassment A mixed method study on Tanzanian sports journalists’ experiences

Abstract

This Master of Arts thesis examines the experiences and safety actions taken by Tanzanian sports journalists to fight against online gender violence. It employs two theories including the Radical Feminist theory and Gender Role Socialisation theory. It uses a mixed method approach that combines fourteen interviews and textual analysis data from 148 comments on Jamii Forum social media platform, as well as 97 comments from six sports journalists’ Instagram pages. The collected data was transcribed and translated from Swahili to English. It was then analysed through NVivo software. This thesis identifies two main online violence experiences that Tanzania journalists encounter: attacks on professionalism and gendered or sexist attacks. Findings also present coping mechanisms and filtering practices used by sports journalists such as blocking, ignoring, and deleting negative comments. Findings also show safety measures used by sports journalists against online violence including reporting their experiences to the authorities and deactivating social media pages. Sports journalists explained that they stopped posting content about Simba and Yanga teams, engaging in self-censorship to avoid being attacked online. Findings show that perceived lack of objectivity in the content they post online triggers online violence to Tanzanian sports journalists. There is a need for more training on digital safety for Tanzanian sports journalists. This master’s thesis calls for collaboration between the government, media owners, sports journalists themselves, and non-governmental organisations to collaborate to fight against online violence to sports journalists.