Media

Poor Treatment of Women on Twitter Extraordinarily High

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: December 18, 2018 6:25 am

Last Updated: January 11, 2020 1:35 pm

Twitter Inc. (NASDAQ: TWTR) has a major new problem as it tries to rid itself of hateful comments and those that originate with political “bad actors.” A new study from Amnesty International shows women are abused on Twitter with great regularity.

The Troll Patrol project is a “joint effort by human rights researchers, technical experts and thousands of online volunteers to build the world’s largest crowd-sourced dataset of online abuse against women.” It looked at tweets to 778 journalists and politicians during 2017. The group was based in the United States and the United Kingdom. The authors reported that the group was broad regarding ideology and political views.

The findings:

7.1% of tweets sent to the women in the study were “problematic” or “abusive”. This amounts to 1.1 million tweets mentioning 778 women across the year, or one every 30 seconds.

Women of colour, (black, Asian, Latinx and mixed-race women) were 34% more likely to be mentioned in abusive or problematic tweets than white women.

Black women were disproportionately targeted, being 84% more likely than white women to be mentioned in abusive or problematic tweets.

Online abuse targets women from across the political spectrum – politicians and journalists faced similar levels of online abuse and we observed both liberals and conservatives alike, as well as left and right leaning media organisations, were targeted.

Among the comments the authors made was that “Twitter is a toxic place for women.” Add race and political leaning and the list is complete, at least according to Amnesty International.