"Women accounted for the majority of online attacks targeting journalists during the initial weeks of the 2026 electoral campaign. Monitoring identified misogynistic aggression in which attempts to delegitimize news reporting were combined with gender-based insults directed at female professionals.
Between August 16 and September 12, the Coalition in Defense of Journalism (CDJor), in partnership with the Internet and Data Science Laboratory (Labic) at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), recorded 7,030 attacks on the press.
Among those, 1,659 attacks were directed at specific journalists on X and Instagram. Women bore the brunt of these encounters, accounting for 59.31% of the total. On X, female journalists were the target of 426 out of 750 attacks. On Instagram, they accounted for approximately 558 out of 909 recorded incidents."
