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Looking at the private direct messages on Instagram of five prominent women found a flood of harassment, including pornographic images and threats of physical and sexual violence, according to a new report released Wednesday.

ReportRun by the Center for Combating Digital Hate, an international nonprofit, was far from being the first to identify the urgent need for social media giants to take more steps to curb harassment on their platforms. Many women who use Instagram – especially those with large followers – reported constantly feeling insecureand advocates say relentless harassment threatens to deprive women of one of the world’s most popular online platforms.

However, five high-profile women opened their thousands of incoming private messages to researchers, allowing for a deep analysis of the misogyny they faced outside of the public domain and how a tech company was handling it. Imran Ahmed, CEO of the nonprofit, wrote that Instagram and Facebook’s parent company, Meta, “created an environment where abuse and harmful content is allowed to flourish.”

“The intended impact of the abuse and the trauma of the continued dam is simple: to remove women from platforms, from public life and further marginalize their voices,” she said.

In a statement, Instagram disputed the report’s conclusions and cited measures it has taken to limit harassment. Users can filter specific words from DMs and comments, turn off the ability to send DMs by strangers, or hide comments and DMs from users who don’t follow them or have recently followed them. It blurs images sent in DM by unfollowers to hide unwanted sexual images and removes a wide variety of abusive content.

“While we disagree with most of the CCDH’s conclusions, we agree that the harassment of women is unacceptable,” Meta’s head of women’s safety said in a statement. “This is why we don’t allow gender-based hatred or any threats of sexual violence, and last year we announced stronger protections for public figures of women.”

According to the report, Instagram’s policies failed to protect the five women from a wide variety of misogyny and threats.

The women represented a range of publics that were prominent in various ways in entertainment, activism and journalism. Actress Amber Heard has 4.1 million followers, while activist Jamie Klinger, who founded the group Reclaim This Streets after Sarah Everard’s death in London last year, has around 3,500 followers. Also in the group are Rachel Riley, a UK TV show host; Bryony Gordon, journalist and author; and Sharan Dhaliwal, founder of the South Asian cultural magazine Burnt Roti.

When messages are sent by someone you don’t follow, they are thrown into a side folder labeled “Requests”. For female public figures, this tends to be a dump.

Of the 8,717 DMs analyzed, the report found that nearly one in 15 had broken Instagram’s rules on harassment and harassment, including 125 instances of image-based sexual harassment.

“On Instagram, anyone can privately send you something that should be illegal,” Ms Riley said in the report. “If they had done it on the street, they would have been arrested.”

When reviewing accounts that sent harassing messages, 227 out of 253 remained active for at least a month after they were reported. Forty-eight hours after reporting, 99.6 percent of accounts remained online. (Instagram said the accounts were banned after three strikes and lost the ability to send direct messages after the first strike.)

The report advocated stronger regulation, accusing Big Tech companies of failing to regulate themselves. Commitments to stop harassment are toothless and secondary to profit motives, the report said.

Meanwhile, women were left to develop their own coping strategies. Some choose not to engage in direct messages, but Ms. Klinger said that was not an option for her, as she sometimes receives requests from the press to talk about her activism.

Ms. Heard said the experience and her inability to do much about it increased her paranoia, anger and frustration.

“Social media is how we connect with each other today, and that medium for me is almost limitless,” the report said. “This is the sacrifice, the compromise, the deal I’ve made for my mental health.”