A large-scale crowdsourced analysis of abuse against women journalists and politicians on Twitter

Delisle, Laure; Kalaitzis, Alfredo; Majewski, Krzysztof; Berker, Archy de; Marin, Milena; Cornebise, Julien

doi:10.48550/arxiv.1902.03093

Cited by 7 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Gorrell et al [5] noted in addition that the impacts or consequences of abusive language are not manifesting in the same ways for male and female MPs, or MPs with intersectional identities of race and gender. Where some abuse is distressing, other abuse is personal, threatening and limits women's participation in the public office [5,10,11].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Liberal Democrats have a spike in abuse in July, most likely reflecting confusion around the leadership contest, which was first postponed to May 2021 [9] . After a number of complaints from party members, this decision was reversed and the election proceeded through July and August 2020 [10] . Though the smaller parties do not receive a large portion of abusive replies, in August, we saw a surge of abuse toward the Democratic Unionist Party, potentially toward Sammy Wilson, who was in conflict with the government over Brexit in August 2020.…”

Section: Difference In Responses To Different Partiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Violence against women in politics is an established issue. A 2016 study indicated that a quarter of women politicians had received some type of physical violence, [9] https://www.libdems.org.uk/leadership-election-postponed [10] and a fifth some time of sexual violence, globally [17]. Studying instances of online violence against women are intended to investigate this specific issue we see playing out in the physical world, to see if we can identify additional features of suppression or exclusion of women from politics in the online space.…”

Section: Differences In Abuse Based On Gendermentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

MP Twitter Engagement and Abuse Post-first COVID-19 Lockdown in the UK: White Paper

Farrell,

Bakir,

Bontcheva

2021

Preprint

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The UK has had a volatile political environment for some years now, with Brexit and leadership crises marking the past five years. With this work, we wanted to understand more about how the global health emergency, COVID-19, influences the amount, type or topics of abuse that UK politicians receive when engaging with the public. This work covers the period of June -December 2020 and analyses Twitter abuse in replies to UK MPs. This work is a follow-up from our analysis of online abuse during the first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. The paper examines overall abuse levels during this new seven month period, analyses reactions to members of different political parties and the UK government, and the relationship between online abuse and topics such as Brexit, government's COVID-19 response and policies, and social issues.In addition, we have also examined the presence of conspiracy theories posted in abusive replies to MPs during the period. We have found that abuse levels toward UK MPs were at an all-time high in December 2020 (5.4% of all reply tweets sent to MPs). This is almost 1% higher that the two months preceding the General Election. In a departure from the trend seen in the first four months of the pandemic, MPs from the Tory party received the highest percentage of abusive replies from July 2020 onward, which stays above 5% starting from September 2020 onward, as the COVID-19 crisis deepened and the Brexit negotiations with the EU started nearing completion.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Difference In Responses To Different Partiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Differences In Abuse Based On Gendermentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

MP Twitter Engagement and Abuse Post-first COVID-19 Lockdown in the UK: White Paper

Farrell,

Bakir,

Bontcheva

2021

Preprint

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“…We wrote guidelines and values for this to guide the ongoing development of the ParityBOT project. 3 These values help us make decision and maintain focus on the goal of this project.…”

Section: Values and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous work that addressed online harassment focused on collecting tweets directed at women engaged in politics and journalism and determining if they were problematic or abusive [3,7,19]. Inspired by these projects, we go one step further and develop a tool that directly engages in the discourse on Twitter in political communities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women, politics and Twitter: Using machine learning to change the discourse

Cuthbertson,

Kearney,

Dawson

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Including diverse voices in political decision-making strengthens our democratic institutions. Within the Canadian political system, there is gender inequality across all levels of elected government. Online abuse, such as hateful tweets, leveled at women engaged in politics contributes to this inequity, particularly tweets focusing on their gender. In this paper, we present ParityBOT: a Twitter bot which counters abusive tweets aimed at women in politics by sending supportive tweets about influential female leaders and facts about women in public life. ParityBOT is the first artificial intelligence-based intervention aimed at affecting online discourse for women in politics for the better. The goal of this project is to: 1) raise awareness of issues relating to gender inequity in politics, and 2) positively influence public discourse in politics. The main contribution of this paper is a scalable model to classify and respond to hateful tweets with quantitative and qualitative assessments. The ParityBOT abusive classification system was validated on public online harassment datasets. We conclude with analysis of the impact of ParityBOT, drawing from data gathered during interventions in both the 2019 Alberta provincial and 2019 Canadian federal elections.

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Abuse in the time of COVID-19: the effects of Brexit, gender and partisanship

Bakir,

Farrell,

Bontcheva

2024

OIR

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PurposeThe authors investigate how COVID-19 has influenced the amount, type or topics of abuse that UK politicians receive when engaging with the public.Design/methodology/approachThis work covers the first year of COVID-19 in the UK, from March 2020 to March 2021 and analyses Twitter abuse in replies to UK MPs. The authors collected and analysed 17.9 million reply tweets to the MPs. The authors present overall abuse levels during different key moments of the pandemic, analysing reactions to MPs by gender and the relationship between online abuse and topics such as Brexit, the government’s COVID-19 response and policies, and social issues.FindingsThe authors have found that abuse levels towards UK MPs were at an all-time high in December 2020. Women (particularly those from non-White backgrounds) receive unusual amounts of abuse, targeting their credibility and capacity to do their jobs. Similar to other large events like general elections and Brexit, COVID-19 has elevated abuse levels, at least temporarily.Originality/valuePrevious studies analysed abuse levels towards MPs in the run-up to the 2017 and 2019 UK General Elections and during the first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. The authors compare previous findings with those of the first year of COVID-19, as the pandemic persisted, and Brexit was forthcoming. This research not only contributes to the longitudinal comparison of abuse trends against UK politicians but also presents new findings, corroborates, further clarifies and raises questions about the previous findings.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-07-2022-0392

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A large-scale crowdsourced analysis of abuse against women journalists and politicians on Twitter

Cited by 7 publications

References 4 publications

MP Twitter Engagement and Abuse Post-first COVID-19 Lockdown in the UK: White Paper

MP Twitter Engagement and Abuse Post-first COVID-19 Lockdown in the UK: White Paper

Women, politics and Twitter: Using machine learning to change the discourse

Abuse in the time of COVID-19: the effects of Brexit, gender and partisanship

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