Are you a target on Twitter?
The Amnesty International Troll Patrol project revealed the scale and nature of online abuse faced by women. And it is frightening but not surprising. It was 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.
n March 2018, Amnesty released its report Toxic Twitter: Violence and abuse against women online which outlines the human rights harms facing women on Twitter. It found, for example:
- 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; both liberals and conservatives alike, as well as left and right leaning media organisations, were targeted.
See the link to their study for a discussion about their findings and potential responses.