The study, conducted by research outfit Demos and cited by a task force composed of members of the major British political parties in Parliament, tracked the use of the words “slut” and “whore” by Twitter users in the first three weeks of April this year.
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United Kingdom think tank Demos spent three weeks monitoring tweets that used the words “slut” and “whore”, using an algorithm to weed out tweets that used the words in conversational tone or to discuss issues surrounding misogyny.
The researchers say that in the United Kingdom alone around 6,500 unique users were targeted by 10,000 aggressive and misogynistic tweets. It found that there were more than 200,000 aggressive tweets that used the words “slut” and “whore” sent out to 80,000 people. Using an in-house algorithm, the research team filtered out conversational or self-identifying tweets to focus only on those with clearly aggressive language aimed at another user.
A 2014 study found sl*t and wh*re were the most commonly used words in abusive tweets.
The study found online misogyny was not restricted to Twitter, but across social media platforms. The report also revealed that 50 per cent of the propagators of such abusive tweets were women.
The surprising finding discovered females were just as bad as men when it came to misogynistic abuse online.
The research will be presented today at the Parliamentary launch of the new cross-party “Reclaim the Internet” campaign, hosted by MPs including Yvette Cooper MP and Stella Creasy MP.
While launching the new movement, Cooper told the BBC: “The truth is nobody knows what the best answers are”.
Alex Krasodomski-Jones of Demos said that aggressive tweets can be a “very personal and often traumatic experience for women”. “What more should social media platforms be doing?” “This is less about policing the internet than it is a stark reminder that we are frequently not as good citizens online as we are offline”.
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“In addition to our policies and user controls, such as block, mute and our new multiple tweet reporting functionality, we work with civil society leaders and academic experts to understand the challenge that exists”, Twitter’s head of trust and safety Kira O’Connor said in a statement.
