‘This is the fate of Libyan women:’ contempt, ridicule, and indifference of Seham Sergiwa

ABSTRACT

As the debate on how harmful online content translates into violent offline actions continues in the Global North, this debate should be enriched by data from the Global South. In Libya, the kidnapping of a female politician (Seham Sergiwa) in 2019 was arguably foreshadowed on social media, with some analysts warning of an imminent danger to her life when tracking social media discourse in June/July 2019. Following her abduction, the outcry was loud and reverberated outside of Libya. However, this was short lived and similar occurrences happen in Libya still. This paper contributes a systematic analysis of Facebook content in the months leading up to and after Sergiwa’s disappearance. Using thematic content analysis to explore 259 posts and 4,367 comments – between January and December 2019 – this paper outlines three dominant themes: Contempt, ridicule and indifference. This study presents a refocus on the dangers of online speech while acknowledging complexities around categorising the former. The study adds nuanced understandings on online discussions in Libya and gendered dynamics in a violent, post-revolutionary environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Libya
• social media
• hate speech
• gender-based violence
• Middle East
• social movements
• public sphere

Introduction

Libya in 2022 is a country contested by local elites and its instability is of interest to various regional and international actors due to its strategic location and oil richness.¹ Women largely play a role on the side-lines in these struggles due to a mixture of local conservativeness and hence intrinsically driven avoidance of public positions but also structural disadvantages for women in public life.² However, there are notable exceptions, such as Najlae Mangoush, who became Libya’s first female Foreign Minister of the Government of National Unity (GNU) in 2021³ or 30 of 200 seats taken by female candidates of Libya’s parliament elected in 2014 which based itself in the Eastern City of Tobruk due to internal skirmishes.⁴ Amongst them was Seham Sergiwa, originally a psychologist who investigated rape as a weapon of war during the 2011 fighting in Libya, but became an elected female politician (MP) in 2014.⁵ She stems from one of Libya’s most important cities in the East and cradle of the revolution, Benghazi.⁶ During her time as MP, she was identified by some as a ‘rare independent voice in Libya’ which means she criticised politicians and military forces from all sides of the political spectrum in Libya.⁷

Seham Sergiwa was abducted in July 2019 from her house in Benghazi and her body has never been found.⁸ For this kidnapping to occur with the brazenness and impunity it has, several dynamics needed to be prevalent: First, the understanding of armed actors that they would not be held accountable for criminal undertakings, such as kidnappings⁹; second, a complicit apprehension amongst parts of society that women should not be outspoken or engage controversially in public life¹⁰; and third, divisiveness amongst Libya’s political elite which foiled any punishing legal action in the name of the public good and safety for all Libyan citizens.¹¹ To the dismay of many Libyans, Libyan women particularly and Seham Sergiwa most specifically, these three dynamics had already been established over the last eight years since the removal of Qaddafi in 2011.

To start with, the understandings of armed actors that they would not be held accountable for criminal undertakings has grown progressively and is directly linked to the militarisation of politics in the country and lacking security sector reform.¹² Leading political figures, such as the prime minister, his cabinet or the speaker of parliament are reliant on armed actors who guarantee their survival against payoffs.¹³ These alliances are not steadfast but instead can shift along ideological and opportunistic lines.¹⁴ They are, however, crucial for political survival as the weakness of Fajez al-Seraj, Libya’s prime minister linked to the Government of National Accord (GNA) of 2016–2021 has shown when he needed to travel from Tunisia to Libya by sea, enter at the Abusita naval base and could never establish himself as influential locally but instead relied largely on external legitimacy.¹⁵ In interviews with members or armed groups in Libya’s capital Tripoli that served as background research for this article, answers like ‘I am not worried’ or ‘[but] we are the police’ were typical answers to my questions about potential fear of punishments after illegal acts, such as destroying religious heritage deemed heretic by some armed actors.¹⁶

Second, the complicit apprehension amongst parts of society that women should not be outspoken or engage controversially in public life has been building incrementally over the last years.¹⁷ While the revolution in 2011 followingly allowed for participation in public life of previously unknown scale in Libya, women quickly learned that these new political freedoms still came with cultural restraints – due to widespread conservatist attitudes in Libya.¹⁸ In 2019, a Libyan female lawyer and founder of a successful business initiative for women in the country explained that ‘We face so much prejudice (…) we get a lot of support as well (…) [but] it is mostly from outside Libya’.¹⁹ While Libyan women in the diaspora remain active in advocating for political and economic inclusion, uttering these demands can be dangerous in the country when parts of it are de-facto controlled by religiously conservative actors that aim to enforce illiberal principles, such as gender segregation.²⁰

Third, the divisiveness amongst Libya’s political elite which foils any punishing legal action in the name of the public good and safety for all Libyan citizens was heightened in 2019, the year of Sergiwa’s kidnapping. In April 2019, military commander Khalifa Haftar and a conglomerate of armed groups he organised in Eastern Libya under the umbrella of a so-called Libyan National Army (LNA, or Libyan Arab Armed Forces LAAF) started an offensive on the country’s capital, Tripoli in Western Libya.²¹ They attacked the United Nations-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) headed by then prime minister Fayez al-Seraj and the internal battle quickly turned into an internationalised civil war,²² with Egypt, France, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates supporting hybrid warfare on Haftar’s side, and Turkey and Qatar aiding Seraj’s side also through conventional and unconventional means.²³ The high stakes for both sides of this civil war foregrounded their partisan interests over broader Libyan interests.²⁴

Finally, international NGOs, as well as the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) have been reporting bleak numbers of violence against women in the country,²⁵ episodes of Salafi-jihadist governance in parts of Libya have contributed to female marginalisation,²⁶ and previous studies on Libyan public discourse in traditional and social media have established that especially social media with its algorithmic platforms disfavours marginalised parts of population, such as women in Libya.²⁷ Part of this disfavour is online harassment and dangerous speech directed at women.²⁸

What defines Libyan discussions with regard to the kidnapping of Serham Sergiwa? I assess this question by investigating the content of public posts and resulting commentaries on Facebook Pages of Libyan media outlets, politicians, and other influential figures, such as politicians and sheikhs. Applying a Facebook-owned product called CrowdTangle (CT), I created a dataset of Facebook Page posts, in Arabic and English, which feature content about Seham Sergiwa from January to December 2019.

Leading up to the kidnapping there were plenty Facebook posts by news outlets of differing legitimacy discussing Seham Sergiwa as she commented on the most contentious political development in Libya at the time – the LNA’s offensive on Tripoli. Some framed her remarks as a brave attempt to speak up against Haftar’s attack, while others framed them as false claims driven by a corrupted agenda and secret support for Haftar’s counterparts in the West of Libya. However, the large majority (92 per cent) of all posts had an anti-female tone captured in the three themes of contempt, ridicule or indifference. I therefore argue that the data supports a pessimistic interpretation for the future of safe involvement by Libyan woman in public life in Libya because even if their participation is not straightforwardly condemned and attacked (contempt), deriding their actions or opinions (ridicule) as well as apathy towards their pains (indifference) is dominating.

Literature review

This article contributes to three different sets of literature: First, literature that links speech and action – more specifically online speech and offline action by bridging the disciplinary divide of sociology, communication and conflict studies; second, critical discussions about the simplified dichotomy between ‘good’ news and ‘bad’ false news as well as analytical boundaries of hate speech which often miss the complexities of harmful content that is not wrong per se; and third, literature on post-revolutionary Libya which traces division in the country that is also reflected in its media and social media landscape.

Online (non-)influence on political developments in the Global South

Previous scholarship has shown how political systems can be affected by coordinated information operations – or disinformation²⁹– as well as individual, and accidental, amplification of misleading information – or misinformation.³⁰ In 2016, the US awoke to how existing strategies and tactics such as Russia’s pursuit of active measures since the Cold War era³¹ had been updated to the social media age.³² However, the US is a consolidated democracy with a plethora of institutional barriers³³ and a professionalised political elite,³⁴ largely protecting the population from authoritarianism.³⁵ Libya and other parts of the Global South do not enjoy this luxury due to recent history of colonialism and – in the case of Libya – dictatorial rule by Muammar al-Qaddafi under his idiosyncratic system of a jamāhīriyyah³⁶ for 42 years.³⁷

The 2011 revolution unravelled a centralised system that was built on personalistic, whimsical rule with little institutions that could have been used to build a democratic post-revolutionary Libya.³⁸ Libya’s recent history is embedded into a wider development of political upheavals around the globe in the early 21^st century: the 2011 and 2019 Arab Uprisings deposed – or at least challenged – authoritarian leaders³⁹; the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong resisted brutal police force when protesting for genuine suffrage⁴⁰; the 2014 Maidan protests in Ukraine faced physical repression when demonstrating for less corruption and European integration,⁴¹ to name just a few.

Especially during moments of transition that create more volatile environments than stable democracies or suppressed autocracies, the course of action is more heavily affected by domestic⁴² and foreign information meddling.⁴³ While comparative politics scholars have established a consensus on the volatility of countries in transition,⁴⁴ academics are divided regarding the attributed importance of the internet to political change⁴⁵ and social movement formation.⁴⁶

In the tradition of Castells’ conception of ‘Networked Social Movements’⁴⁷ and what Langman calls ‘Internetworked Social Movements’,⁴⁸ some scholars argue that the internet is a significant influence catapulting social movement formation into a new era as social media have proven to be an essential tool for social movements,⁴⁹ emphasising connection over action or equalling online campaigns and communication to social movement formation.⁵⁰ These conceptualisations are criticised by others that point out the long and arduous process of social movements not only to mobilise for political action but to form, grow and sustain themselves – especially in hostile environments when they form as protest movements to an authoritarian government.⁵¹ Furthermore, the internet and social media did not manage to overcome existing structural inequalities in modern societies.⁵²

This article contributes to the outlined discussion by arguing that the violence conducted against Sergiwa was nurtured on Facebook and hence had online harbingers but the impunity and overall dynamic of violent abductions and killings are a symptom of contemporary Libya which is dominated by militias.⁵³ With this adding to a third line of arguments that emphasise for online speech to be contributing,⁵⁴ exacerbating,⁵⁵ and sometimes even the final tipping point if it aligns with evolving opportunity structures⁵⁶ for political action but not its necessary impetus.⁵⁷ With this, the article continues filling a gap that has emerged over the last two decades as Della Porta pointed out:

Literature on social movements, mass media, and democracy has rarely interacted (…) Research on the mass media has also tended to isolate them as a separate power, reflecting on the technological constraints and opportunities for communication. Social movement studies have mainly considered democratic characteristics as setting the structure of political opportunities that social movements have to address and – more rarely – looked at the constraints that mass media impose upon powerless actors.⁵⁸

In other words, traditionally, social movement scholars have been side-lining the nexus between collective action, media and communication processes, and instead focused on movement’s formation/organisation and identity/symbolic processes.⁵⁹ With the transition to a more interactive communication environment where ‘citizens are no longer simply receivers of messages but increasingly act as producers and transmitters of contents, irreversibly modified the overall field of opportunities and constraints’,⁶⁰ sociologists are expected to unravel the societal and hence offline consequences that emerge from these new internet technologies.

Harmful content and its analytical complexities in the Global South

By 2022, the exploitation of social media platforms by malevolent actors has been documented extensively.⁶¹ In Western contexts, the dichotomy is often seen as extremist actors exploiting social media platforms on one hand,⁶² and other societal or state actors largely using these platforms for beneficial, benign purposes on the other.⁶³ In non-Western countries, however, it is often authoritarian state actors who are most prolific in spreading propaganda, including disinformation, due to their access to state resources and their desire to dominate the information landscape.⁶⁴ Similar difficulties with distinguishing between benevolent and malevolent actors applies to foreign meddling as some foreign interference might actually work in support of democratic actors⁶⁵ or at least in defence of a United Nations (UN) supported government, such as the GNA in Libya.⁶⁶

Existing scholarship has addressed those analytical complexities by arguing that information meddling escapes the dichotomous distinction between (bad) fake news and (good) real news but instead the prevalence of ‘slanted narratives’ harms Libya.⁶⁷ Malmasi and Zampieri are amongst the scholars who have argued that ‘the main challenge lies in discriminating profanity and hate speech from each other’.⁶⁸ With regard to anti-female rhetoric, Richardson-Self explains that while hate speech is one of the most relevant conceptual categories in

anti‐oppression politics today; a great deal of energy and political will is devoted to identifying, characterizing, contesting, and (sometimes) penalizing hate speech. However, despite the increasing inclusion of gender identity as a socially salient trait, antipatriarchal politics has largely been absent within this body of scholarship.⁶⁹

As a consequence, she develops an argument that situates sexist speech as different from hate speech while misogynistic speech is argued to be hate speech – independent of it targeting some or all women.⁷⁰ Complimentary, research by Judson et al. has shown how online disinformation is used to manipulate impressions of female politicians.⁷¹

This theoretical development is important as it roots hate speech in structural oppression, by outlining how it can be patriarchy‐enforcing speech. With this clarifying what is wrong with the practice, and how bad it is in relation to other abuses. This article stands in tradition of this thinking and contributes additional empirics for a further refinement of the kinds of expressions that can and should count as instances of hate speech. However, the article removes itself from the conceptual focus on hate speech as it acknowledges the conceptual narrowness limiting the analysis if the analytical determination if hate speech was in focus. Instead, and to allow for a most appropriate answer to the research question, this article follows Grossmann et al’s line of thinking by arguing that much of the collected online content would not fall into existing categories of ‘hate speech’ or ‘dis/misinformation’ but instead is harmful content that escapes falsification and ‘solely’ relies on misogynistic framing.⁷² However, this analytical ambiguity does not make it less impactful.

In several countries, defamations of character have been employed to justify acts of rape and sexual harassment of women.⁷³ Against this backdrop, Mohammed explored how these justifications straddle between misogynism, hate speech and local norms – in the case of Iraq culminating in the ‘problematic of extreme patriarchal violence against women’. However, females resist and challenge these norms consistently at the same time.⁷⁴ With regard to the latter, the breakage of local norms (and hence ‘crossing a red line’) by females can trigger but also reinforce the former two (misogynism and hate speech). El-Ashmawy argues that in Egypt, sexual harassment ‘transformed from a hidden phenomenon to an overtly prevalent social epidemic’.⁷⁵ With this, she declares the incorporation of sexual harassment part of accepted behaviour in society. These publications underline the comparative dimension of this study – specifically on Libya and Seham Sergiwa – as it sheds light on red lines for females and explores how these boundaries reflect shared convictions within online user communities.

Political divisions reverberating throughout the country’s (social) media

Existing scholarship on post-revolutionary Libya has shown how the media and social media landscape is divided and polarised.⁷⁶ While 2011 provided a novel opportunity for the country’s journalists to report independently and without fear of the Qaddafi regime,⁷⁷ the following years darkened this outlook with local journalists becoming included into intimidation strategies of local militias pursuing their partisan interests.⁷⁸ In addition to the infringements on the freedom of speech due to intimidation when covering political topics, such as corruption or favouritism,⁷⁹ Libyan media became polarised along the lines of the country’s biggest fault line: Haftar’s forces dominating the Eastern part of the country and the GNA in the Western part of the country.⁸⁰

Wollenberg and Richter explain how the history of media in Libya is a history of political reliabilities with barely any room for diverse opinions⁸¹ – following the de-facto separation of the country into parallel ruling authorities in the East and West, the diversity of the early days of the uprisings has turned into ‘exclusionist polarization’.⁸² Escaping this polarisation is close to impossible for three reasons: a) there is no functioning liberal advertising market which would facilitate donor-independent media outlets; b) possible donors with sufficient financial capacity to establish a media organisation are incorporated into local political cleavages that are shaped by a zero- sum logic; and resultingly c) media have become part of this political power game in which ‘key actors use communication to compete for loyalty in the political marketplace’.⁸³

Hand in hand with this polarisation, other usage-based regional trends can also be found in Libya such as the burgeoning importance of Facebook⁸⁴ as well as other platforms, such as messaging apps for news, propaganda and political discussions.⁸⁵ These dynamics are partially tied to the demand for unfiltered and hence less biased information that citizens hope to find particularly on messaging apps which are associated with being platforms for friends and family with none or less algorithmic polarisation and pollution by propagandists.⁸⁶ Finally, female journalists are under particular strain given the polarised information ecosystems in addition to local chauvinism that can translate into online as well as offline harassment campaigns.⁸⁷

This article contributes to this bleak assessment by focusing on the portrayal on public social media pages, including news sites and individual public profiles and resulting commentaries of the lead up and kidnapping of a female public figure who tried to utter her independent assessments of the current political situation in 2019. The analysis contributes to the latter discussion of local chauvinism and takes the political dividedness and polarisation of the media and social media landscape as pre-requisite. With this, the article helps to make an overarching argument of female targeting by both sides of the Libyan political cleavage.

Research question, materials and methods

The main research question for this article is What defines Libyan discussions with regard to the kidnapping of Serham Sergiwa? Related sub-questions are as follows: Which themes are dominant when discussing Serham Sergiwa generally? Which themes were dominant when discussing the kidnapping? Do themes differ for Eastern-, vs. Western-based newspaper and users? Do themes differ before vs. after Sergiwa was kidnapped?

By answering these questions, this paper addresses how a public female figure is portrayed online, how her kidnapping is interpreted and overall, sheds light on the male-dominated power structures and violence in the country.

Libya was picked as a case study due to the country’s significance for offline consequences of online speech. Over twelve years after the revolution and removal of the Qaddafi regime, the country has lost its monopoly of power and instead various actors compete over the legitimate use of violence. This volatility exacerbates dangerous speech, rumours and calls for violence online. Therefore, this case study is an example of continuous political transition which exacerbates the necessity to understand nuances on social media and unravel how online speech can have life-threatening effects for (some) people as the surrounding environment is to their detriment. Apart from Syria, Libya is the only other country that was part of the so-called Arab Spring revolts in 2011 and which over twelve years later is in a state of incontiguous civil war.⁸⁸ This is impactful for women as women are targeted in war to establish dominance,⁸⁹ dehumanise the enemy⁹⁰ and prevent inclusive alliance building.⁹¹

Furthermore, compared to research on Egypt, Morocco, Syria, or Tunisia (other countries that participated in the 2011 uprisings), Libya still remains understudied.⁹² The kidnapping of Seham Sergiwa was picked as a case study because it was a local development that reverberated further than the kidnappers (or killers) likely foresaw. This put Libyan public figures and news sites under particular pressure to react.

For this article, qualitative analysis of the data goes hand in hand with descriptive statistics of the findings. Qualitative content analysis was applied as it allows for the flexibility needed when analysing text and visual data⁹³ in a methodological way by relying on a mixture of qualitative and quantitative description.⁹⁴ Next to being useful for numerical assertions of word frequencies, sociologists and communication scholars have argued for decades that qualitative content analysis is an adequate way to scrutinise language used in order to create clusters, which share explicit or implicit similar meanings.⁹⁵ In this tradition, qualitative data analysis aims to contextualise the meaning of various utterances.⁹⁶ To complement this meaning seeking, the use of descriptive statistics allows for following the development of thematic clusters over periods of time.⁹⁷

The data was collected using a Facebook-owned product called CrowdTangle (CT), which provides access and allows data collection on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit with regard to public sites, excluding private profiles. In Libya, Facebook developed into the most important social media platform⁹⁸ and hence is central to this study. While the reliance on a Facebook-owned product comes with inherent opacities that are rooted in the platform’s policies, the tool (CT) is still seen as the best available method to gather and analyse large amounts of Facebook data without bias based on individual profiles used for data collection.⁹⁹

Furthermore, despite the prevalence of Arabic content, this paper also includes English content to gain a better understanding of potential changes in language when the kidnapping sparked international outrage (or the inexistence of changes in language as the local actors disregard potential international outrage due to their established local power position, as explained above). In order to decide which public sites to include, this study relies on existing research on the Libyan media and social media landscape by Wollenberg and Richter¹⁰⁰ and Grossmann et al.¹⁰¹ and enriched it by four influential public profiles (Sadeq al-Gharyani, Noman Benotman, Ahmed al-Mismari, Aref Ali Nayed) which came up in interviews from 2018 to 2022 with several Libyan stakeholders who are part of politics or civil society.¹⁰² While this interview data is not the primary source for the data analysis of this paper, the interview data was enriching and helped to provide an even better-informed starting point for data gathering via CT.

A total of 259 posts and 4,367 comments were collected from 31 Libyan news outlets (16 associated with Eastern and 15 with the Western power structures) and four public profiles (two associated with Eastern and two with the Western power structures) on Facebook between 19 January and 19 December 2019. The collected posts were found via keyword query (‘Seham’ and ‘Sergiwa’ and different spellings in Arabic and English), applying the historical data search on CT. The Facebook sites had between 127,861 and 4,945,785 followers at the time the data was gathered. All 4,626 posts and comments were included in the current analysis.

To start with, I contrived the most common words (including synonyms) used by the outlets as well as the users commenting. Table 1 shows that the most common term used was ‘god’ (or allah) and its derivatives, across both pro-East sites and pro-West sites. This is unsurprising given the conservativeness of Libyan society and popular referencing to God in daily speech.¹⁰³ Other words that repeatedly occurred included: Benghazi, Tripoli, parliament, fate, death. These ideas will be explored further in the content analysis but provide initial insight into the common terms in the data overall. If only the posts itself without the comments would have been analysed, ‘news’ would have been the most frequent word.

Table 1. The ten most common words.

Word	Relative frequency
God	43.2 per cent
News	42.1 per cent
May (the verb)	39.1 per cent
Libya	33.7 per cent
Benghazi	19.1 per cent
Kidnapping	15.9 per cent
People	14.6 per cent
Tripoli	9.1 per cent
Fate	8.3 per cent
Death	8.1 per cent

The qualitative content analysis for this paper will rely on coding the large amounts of data collected to organise and structure the data into thematic clusters that share explicit or implicit similar meanings.¹⁰⁴ The coding is rooted in grounded theory, whereby the analysis (thematic clusters) is guided by the gathered data and inductively constructed, instead of pre-conceptualised thematic clusters.¹⁰⁵ The themes elaborated on in the findings section of this paper evolved out of both explicit content (surface content) as well as implicit content (underlying meaning).¹⁰⁶ Each umbrella theme has several codes that fall under the overarching theme. Some codes also have sub-codes (or categories) that fit solely under a specific code. A code book was created with all codes and sub-codes to guide the coding of evidence, and the process was carried out solely by the author using NVivo12 software.

The data was read and re-read several times to ensure consistency in the coding process. During the coding process several themes were identified. However, there was room to re-evaluate the themes throughout the process. In the end, four overarching themes emerged from the data to describe Libyan Facebook discourse around Sergiwa’s kidnapping: contempt, ridicule, indifference, and sorrow and anger.

It is important to emphasise that themes are not mutually exclusive and can overlap as they reflect a complex landscape of sentiments. Taken together, the identified themes respond to the main research question arguing that an anti-female tone dominates the social media discourse. The different codes featuring in the themes show the categories that are dominant. Overall, I therefore argue that the data supports a pessimistic interpretation for the future of safe involvement by Libyan woman in public life in Libya because even if their participation is not straightforwardly condemned and attacked (contempt), deriding their actions or opinions (ridicule) as well as apathy towards their pains (indifference) is dominating. One aspect that is structurally significant for Libyan society but cannot be answered with these research methods is a (potential) social-desirability bias.¹⁰⁷ Exploring how users’ comments may be influenced by a desire to align with societal norms and enhance their image within their respective communities could skew their comments towards something they ‘should think’ versus what they ‘actually think’ – for the purposes of this study, I assume the latter but recognise the limitations that come with it.

In the 4,626 entries, 5,788 codes were created. These codes constitute the four themes: contempt (43 per cent), ridicule (28 per cent), indifference (21 per cent), sorrow and anger (6 per cent) with the remaining content being ‘other’ (2 per cent).

Results: contempt, ridicule, indifference and sorrow and anger

Contempt

The theme of contempt subsumes a plethora of accusations and dismissals of Seham Sergiwa’s political involvements and public comments. This theme makes up 43 per cent of the overall analysed social media discourse and is regularly vile in its content. It includes codes related to criminal accusations, justifications of rape, religious condemnation, and sexual harassment with a specific gendered tone. Taken together this theme indicates that the analysed news outlets, public figures and Libyan user commentary were complotting in depicting Sergiwa as a criminal worthy of rape, sexual exploitation and religious castigation. Under contempt, the notion that Sergiwa’s kidnapping had not been proven and she might have fled the country, been killed by family members or killed herself was also emphasised, noting that the idea of any legitimate concern or empathy with Sergiwa was misbegotten.

The most prominent code under the theme contempt was, depressingly, religious condemnation, with 52 per cent of the theme under this code. This data is characterised by exclamations that Sergiwa insulted God, is unworthy of God’s protection and/or ‘needs’ God to punish her. For example: ‘She [Sergiwa] should have been punished a long time ago (…) [but] God is great, and he is the disposer of all affairs (…) may God forgive all who defended her’. This data also correlates Sergiwa’s disappearance with Godly intervention into Libyan developments – arguing that her fate, just as the fate of Libya, is predestined. In the same stroke, Sergiwa is therefore condemned (with religious phrasing) and her value as an individual diminished while painting her fate as part of a broader struggle of good versus evil.

After religious condemnation, criminal accusations were the second most prominent code under the theme contempt, with 28 per cent of the theme under this code. The data under this code portrays a broad variety of claims that either explicitly state Sergiwa is a criminal, such as when accusing her of theft: ‘she is actually a thief (…) she was caught many times stealing’; or implicitly allude to her (alleged) criminal undertakings, like insinuating ‘secret channels of communication between her and Tripoli’ or elaborating that: ‘She was one of them [who] is was in Qaddafi’s book (…) she was always corrupt (…) [she] belongs in prison’.

Justifications of rape are part of different codes under this theme and sometimes overlap with the code religious condemnation or criminal accusations as the demand for her to be raped is couched into other language justifying the rape in religious or worldly terms. The fact that some Libyans were calling for Sergiwa to be raped as a reaction to the outspokenness about Haftar’s offensive is a bleak and disheartening insight into the standing of female public figures in Libya. At the core of every politician is the need to publicly assume a position and opinion – even if it might be controversial for some citizens.

When Sergiwa spoke out and uttered her opinion about the renewed fighting, the analysed data does not acknowledge her right to a (controversial) opinion, but instead captures prevailing convictions that women should not be outspoken or engage controversially in public life in Libya. After her disappearance in July 2019 and following days of uncertainty about her fate led to an outpouring of spitefulness with some comments expressing ‘hope’ that she has been raped. For example, ‘Her fate is what she deserves (…) of course, she should be raped’. Or ‘Let her taste the sweetness of rape (…) [like] she tried to rape Libya’.

The continued invocation of sexual violence as an ‘appropriate punishment’ for a female politician engaging controversially in public life in Libya, weakens hopes for a healthy public discourse in Libya generally, but flattens this hope with regard to female public figures more specifically.

Ridicule

Ridicule comprises 28 per cent of the overall data and displays the second overarching refuge of Libyan social media discourse with regard to Sergiwa’s public remarks and disappearance. Codes under this theme range from general ridicule of Sergiwa as a person as well as her involvement in public life to ridiculing even the idea that she is ‘worth kidnapping’. Often these notions are combined, and codes overlap. For example, the comment ‘Hahahaha she got what she deserved (…) [but] who even bothered to take her, she has no worth’ addresses multiple forms of ridicule. It makes fun of a serious violent act, such as kidnapping, and simultaneously degrades Sergiwa to a point where even for this act she is ‘not worth it’. Similar undertones are in this comment: ‘She is a donkey (…) who would kidnap a donkey?’

Three child nodes that run prominent under the code of ridicule are comparing Sergiwa to a donkey (1), a goat (2), or a witch (3). For example: ‘Donkey Sergiwa, donkey Sergiwa come out of your hiding’, or ‘She is not even a woman of Libya (…) look at her [she] is a goat’, or ‘She is a witch (…) who knows where she went [she] will appear again once day like witches do (…) she has already put misery on Libya (…) [but] witches like her continue’ respectively. All three work to dehumanise Sergiwa by equating her either with animals or with untrustworthy, heretic figures (such as a witch). Particularly for religiously conservative Libyans witches are exemplary for areligious people, who are by definition worth less than a religiously pious person.

Ridicule is a powerful theme because this type of discourse works in two ways to keep women away from decision making positions/power in Libya. First, it can drag female public figures into a dual draining mechanism, where they are investing in attempts to contribute to decision making while simultaneously needing to fend off efforts of undermining their professional work by designating them as persons who cannot be taken seriously (independent of what they do). Second, it can instil discomfort and potential fear in Libyan women who are deliberating taking on (more) public positions. Both of these repercussions structurally disadvantage Libyan women with regard to public involvement and influence.

Indifference

Indifference refers to the way many commentaries are making sense of Sergiwa’s disappearance especially in the later part of the analysed timeframe – when it is increasingly unlikely that she was faking her disappearance. The third largest theme of this data would likely have been a bigger theme if the analysis had focused solely on the time after her disappearance. As it stands, indifference comprises 21 per cent of the overall data. The theme of indifference touches upon the insignificance of Sergiwa generally and her disappearance specifically. Instead, the codes under this theme represent the various ways in which the case of her disappearance is belittled and devalued.

Most importantly in those belittlements is the comparison and drawing an analytical line between Sergiwa’s fate versus Libya’s fate. This is done by lamenting the sombre political situation Libya portrays in Summer 2019 – with different authorities with varying legitimacy exercising control in separate parts of the country which work to the detriment of Libya’s unity and development as a whole. Additionally, General Haftar and his LNA started an attack on the capital Tripoli, which not only puts Libyan lives in the capital in danger, but also threatens another round of draining resources in Eastern parts of Libya (largely under the control of the LNA). In line with this, engagement with Sergiwa’s disappearance is more of a side note couched into a broader comment on Libya’s mischance. For example, in a comment from 1 August 2019 (less than two weeks after her disappearance): ‘Important is that the army [LNA] enters Tripoli (…) Sergiwa is news of yesterday’.

Taking this line of argument further, the code ‘East West rivalry’ also includes engagement with Sergiwa’s disappearance that, however, only serves as reference points to call on support for either side of the renewed conflict. In other words, some pro-Western accounts use the kidnapping to drum up the cruciality of donating, publicly emboldening, or joining the fighting forces in Tripoli; versus pro-Eastern accounts that reference her disappearance as a ‘Western’ stunt aiming to undermine morale and depicting life in Benghazi (a city in Libya’s East) as unjustly insecure. Independent of the content being pro-Western or pro-Eastern, all this commentary engages with Sergiwa’s fate only as a facilitator for the real issue at stake: Haftar’s offensive on Tripoli and the looming decision which forces might gain dominance in a divided Libya.

Not represented in the codes under this theme but still of significance is the fact that the collected data for two leading figures in Libya’s East and West (Gharyani and Nayef respectively) do not mention Sergiwa by name and the discussion of her abduction only happens in the comments by users interpreting remarks of the two men as related to Sergiwa. Other codes under this theme exhibit other ways in which indifference took hold of social media discourse with regard to Sergiwa’s disappearance, such as ‘The reputation of Libya and Libyans gets tarnished every day (…) her [Sergiwa’s] kidnapping is useless’.

Sorrow and anger

Sorrow and anger, the smallest theme, comprises 6 per cent of the overall data, and notes expressions of empathy towards Sergiwa and her family. It includes codes that express frustration and anger by highlighting that Sergiwa’s kidnapping is exemplary for the dangers Libyan women face when they engage in public life. For example: ‘This is the fate of the Libyan women (…) the whole country is kidnapped (…) women are suffocating’.

Implicitly real sorrow also rings true in some of the data when saying ‘May Allah rest her soul in peace’ or ‘May God have mercy on her and protect her family’. The theme of sorrow and anger also addresses issues of uncertainties about what happened with her as speculations about her death and how she died are weaved in with expressions of sorrow and anger that she disappeared. Through this data, a resignation with the status quo in Libya and the nebulousness around Sergiwa’s kidnapping comes true.

While these expressions are unsurprising, given the described status of Libya at the time, it is interesting that the theme is the smallest in the analysed data and the data coded under this theme often stands by itself i.e. received little engagement from other users when compared to utterances coded under the three earlier themes (contempt, ridicule and indifference).

Looking forward

The analysed social media discourse with regard to Seham Sergiwa’s disappearance portrays three dominant themes that signal a grim state of affairs and future for female, public, controversial involvement in Libya: contempt, ridicule and indifference. As can be seen throughout this paper, potentially anticipated reactions, such as expressing empathy with the victim and its family, is side-lined over derogatory and belittling content.

This research is far from complete. Each and every one of these themes could be its own research focus, and as such, this paper should be seen solely as an introduction to the topic. Furthermore, the analysed data is not a comprehensive dataset of Libyan discourse, or even online discourse, at the time but a snapshot into most prominent public sites and comments on Libya’s most important social media platform. Future research should assess how content across a multitude of platforms differs or is similar. Furthermore, the analysed data is limited as it solely relies on Facebook; while it includes TV stations that have a Facebook presence, it disregards radio, which is a significant resource and medium of exchange in Libya.¹⁰⁸ Finally, the data cannot account for Seham Sergiwa being an exception to the rule, meaning that her individual profile might be tied to the themes emerging from the analysed social media content. However, given the widespread anti-female violence in the country, this possibility was assessed as improbable.

This journal article contributed to three different sets of literature: first, literature that links speech and action – more specifically online speech and offline action by bridging the disciplinary divide of sociology, communication and conflict studies; second, critical discussions about the simplified dichotomy between ‘good’ news and ‘bad’ false news as well as analytical boundaries of hate speech which often miss the complexities of harmful content that is not wrong or hateful per se; and third, literature on post-revolutionary Libya which traces division in the country that is also reflected in its media and social media landscape.

It argues that female public figures in Libya are under particular strain given the polarised information ecosystems in addition to local chauvinism that can translate into online as well as offline harassment campaigns. This article enriched this bleak assessment by focussing on the portrayal on public social media pages, including news sites and individual public profiles and resulting commentaries of the lead up and kidnapping of a female public figure who tried to utter her independent assessments of the current political situation in 2019. The analysis contributed to the latter discussion of local chauvinism and takes the political dividedness and polarisation of the media and social media landscape as pre-requisite. With this, the article helped to make an overarching argument of female targeting by both sides of the Libyan political cleavage.

Several aspects are touched upon in this article without further elaboration. Two of these are aspects of conspiracy-believing in Libya as well tangible disappointments of Libyans with state structures and institutions. Both of these points deserve exploration and more research – not only in Libya but the region more broadly. For example, future studies could tie back similar data as this study gathered to conspiracy believing and making – with that filling a gap in conspiracy scholarship which is dominated by studies focusing on the Global North.¹⁰⁹

Finally, the study contributed to the debate on how harmful online content translates into violent offline actions by adding data from the Global South, in this case Libya. By using thematic content analysis to explore 259 posts and 4,367 comments – between January and December 2019 – I outlined the three dominant themes: contempt, ridicule and indifference and argued that the data supports a pessimistic interpretation for the future of safe involvement by Libyan woman in public life in Libya because even if their participation is not straightforwardly condemned and attacked (contempt), deriding their actions or opinions (ridicule) as well as apathy towards their pains (indifference) is dominating. Overall, this study presented a refocus on the dangers of online speech while acknowledging complexities around categorising the former, added nuanced understandings on online discussions in Libya and gendered dynamics in a violent, post-revolutionary environment, and generally contributed to the outlined bodies of literature but brought in a novel contribution as the analysis bridges different, siloed literature bodies.

To sum up, the focus on Libya added depth but a comparative analysis examining the dynamics at play in this study would advance research into norms that – if seen as crossed by females – can trigger backlash. Particularly more research combining online and offline dynamics would illuminate country-specifics while further underlining the (non-)importance of the online space for female harassment and assault.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks several individuals for speaking with her providing critical insights in the lead up to this project. She is also sincerely grateful for feedback by Dr Gina Vale and Zelly Martin to previous versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Inga Kristina Trauthig

Inga Kristina Trauthig is a visiting fellow at King’s College London with the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies (IMES). She is a security studies researcher and holds a PhD from the Department of War Studies. During the time of her PhD, she was a research fellow with the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR).

Notes

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