Hate speech against Afghan women is not only a set of words. It is a price attached to being seen, and many women are paying it by being silenced.

How the abuse arrives

After the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, street protests were often suppressed. Social media, especially X, became one of the few places where Afghan women could still organize, speak, and reach an international audience.

That visibility came at a cost: in a 2023 investigation, the open-source research group Afghan Witness analyzed more than 78,000 posts in Dari and Pashto aimed at politically engaged Afghan women. Comparing June to December 2021 with the same months in 2022, posts combining abuse terms with prominent women’s names rose by 217 percent, roughly tripling.

The abuse was overwhelmingly sexual. More than 60 percent of the 2022 posts used sexualized terms, and women described receiving pornographic images and threats of rape and death in their direct messages. Others were labeled “agents of the West” or accused of inventing their stories to win asylum. Researchers also found religious and ethnic slurs layered on top.

The timing is something that we should pay attention to; spikes in abuse lined up with Taliban restrictions on women’s dress, education, and access to public spaces, and with the moments women took to the streets to protest them. The women who spoke loudest were targeted hardest. Low-ranking Taliban and pro-Taliban accounts were the most frequent abusers, though perpetrators came from many political and ethnic backgrounds.

The retreat

The most visible cost is a quiet one: women stepping back. Afghan Witness described a “chilling effect” on women’s participation online. Interviewees said they avoided interactions, made their accounts anonymous, posted less, and censored what they did say to limit the backlash.

One interviewee summed up the stigma: a woman who is active on social media, she said, is treated as a prostitute. When visibility itself becomes evidence against a woman’s reputation, staying silent can feel like the only safe choice.

The retreat also has professional costs. One female journalist told researchers she had closed some of her accounts and stopped reading comments. As a result, she had less access to online sources and information than her male colleagues. Abuse aimed at one woman’s voice ends up narrowing her ability to do her job.

Beyond the screen

For these women, the line between online and offline is thin. Some interviewees avoided in-person interactions because they feared for their physical safety. One woman explained that the hatred people show on social media is the same hatred they would show face to face.

The abuse also reaches into families. Researchers found it could strengthen male relatives’ control over women’s behavior and clothing, and women worried it could lead to violence within the home. A post written by a stranger can change what a woman is allowed to do in her own house.

The emotional toll is heavy. Women described fear, anxiety, stress, and low self-esteem after being targeted, and one called the messages psychologically traumatic. For activists already in exile, the abuse follows them across borders: Afghan Witness documented pro-Taliban accounts targeting an exiled activist in Germany after she organized a hunger strike.

Why it matters

Silence is not a side effect of this abuse; it is the point. Inside Afghanistan, women are already barred from secondary school, most jobs, and much of public life. Online spaces were one of the last places their voices could still be heard. When abuse pushes them out of those spaces too, the exclusion becomes nearly complete.

This is also a free speech problem. Debates about online speech often focus on the right to post. But when a woman deletes her account because of a flood of threats, her speech has been silenced just as surely as if it were censored.

The world loses something as well. Much of what outsiders know about life under the Taliban comes from Afghan women documenting it themselves. Every voice that goes quiet leaves a gap in that record.

Closing

It’s important to recognize that this is an active harm. Beyond the online harm, though, no Afghan woman is ever “safe.” One post with your face on means you and your entire family are at risk of being executed. Creating a domain for Afghan women to truly speak up is the next step in enhancing women’s rights.