ISLAMABAD (AP) — Online abuse and hate speech targeting politically active women in Afghanistan has significantly increased since the Taliban took over the country in Aug. 2021, according to a report released Monday by a U.K.-based rights group.

Afghan Witness, an open-source project run by the non-profit Center for Information Resilience, says it found that abusive posts tripled, a 217% increase, between June-December 2021 and the same period of 2022.

Building on expertise gained from similar research in Myanmar, the Afghan Witness team analyzed publicly available information from X, formerly known as Twitter, and conducted in-depth interviews with six Afghan women to investigate the nature of the online abuse since the Taliban takeover.

The report said the team of investigators “collected and analyzed over 78,000 posts” written in Dari and Pashto — two local Afghan languages — directed at “almost 100 accounts of politically active Afghan women.”

The interviews indicated that the spread of abusive posts online helped make the women targets, the report’s authors said. The interviewees reported receiving messages with pornographic material as well as threats of sexual violence and death.

“I think the hatred they show on social media does not differ from what they feel in real life,” one woman told Afghan Witness.

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Taliban government spokesmen were not immediately available to comment about the report.

The report identified four general...

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