1 Introduction
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Prominence: First and foremost, attention and therefore abuse focuses on a limited number of individuals most in the public eye.
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Event surge: Secondly, events may result in a surge in attention/hostility toward particular individuals—for example a political event or a media appearance.
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Engagement: Thirdly, an opinionated tweet by a politician provides a focus for any ill feeling towards their viewpoint or them as individuals that may be present on the Twitter platform.
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Identity: Fourthly, politics, gender, ethnicity and other personal factors affect the opinions that individual may express without incurring abuse (“norm violations” [7] or political intimidation) as well as the form that abuse is likely to take.
2 Related work
3 Corpus and methods
3.1 Identifying abusive texts
3.2 Collecting tweets
3.3 Corpus
Party | Female | Male | Non-binary | Total | Not male |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Labour Party | 310 | 275 | 1 | 586 | 53.07 |
Conservative Party | 162 | 367 | 0 | 529 | 30.62 |
Liberal Democrats | 168 | 352 | 1 | 521 | 32.44 |
Green Party | 150 | 211 | 2 | 363 | 41.87 |
The Brexit Party | 43 | 153 | 0 | 196 | 21.94 |
Independent | 23 | 86 | 0 | 109 | 21.10 |
Scottish National Party | 20 | 39 | 0 | 59 | 33.9 |
Plaid Cymru | 8 | 22 | 0 | 30 | 26.67 |
Other | 50 | 138 | 0 | 188 | 26.60 |
Total | 934 | 1643 | 4 | 2581 | 36.38 |
4 Findings
4.1 Online abuse toward politicians is increasing
Period | Original MP tweets | MP retweets | MP replies | Replies to MPs | Abusive replies to MPs | % abusive |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
3 Nov–15 Dec 2019 | 184,014 | 334,952 | 131,292 | 3,541,769 | 157,844 | 4.46 |
29 Apr–9 Jun 2017 | 126,216 | 245,518 | 71,598 | 961,413 | 31,454 | 3.27 |
Period | Original MP tweets | MP retweets | MP replies | Replies to MPs | Abusive replies to MPs | % abusive |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Nov 3–Nov 9 | 18,633 | 40,683 | 14,456 | 464,473 | 17,854 | 3.84 |
Nov 10–Nov 16 | 19,845 | 40,110 | 14,651 | 444,045 | 20,742 | 4.67 |
Nov 17–Nov 23 | 30,445 | 57,764 | 19,372 | 547,748 | 22,007 | 4.02 |
Nov 24–Nov 30 | 35,254 | 62,688 | 23,674 | 572,976 | 27,666 | 4.83 |
Dec 1–Dec 7 | 37,615 | 65,601 | 24,237 | 590,781 | 28,151 | 4.77 |
Dec 8–Dec 14 | 42,222 | 78,106 | 34,902 | 921,746 | 41,421 | 4.49 |
4.2 Exploring the four factors
4.2.1 Factor 1: more prominent individuals receive disproportionately more abuse
Name | Abusive replies | All replies | % abusive | % of total |
---|---|---|---|---|
Boris Johnson | 34,256 | 565,396 | 6.06 | 21.70 |
Jeremy Corbyn | 33,782 | 636,630 | 5.31 | 21.40 |
Matthew Hancock | 12,156 | 186,543 | 6.52 | 7.70 |
Michael Gove | 7255 | 82,240 | 8.82 | 4.60 |
David Lammy | 6261 | 106,594 | 5.87 | 3.97 |
Jo Swinson | 3819 | 110,533 | 3.46 | 2.42 |
James Cleverly | 3571 | 58,856 | 6.07 | 2.26 |
Jacob Rees-Mogg | 3342 | 48,311 | 6.92 | 2.12 |
Sajid Javid | 3082 | 57,712 | 5.34 | 1.95 |
Diane Abbott | 2262 | 52,279 | 4.33 | 1.43 |
4.2.2 Factor 2: events lead to abuse surges
4.2.3 Factor 3: opinionated tweets precipitate abuse
4.2.4 Factor 4: personal characteristics affect abuse
All abuse terms | Count | Political abuse terms | Count | Sexist abuse terms | Count |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
fuck off | 8342 | tory scum | 284 | witch | 224 |
idiot | 6766 | remoaner | 276 | stupid woman | 149 |
twat | 4337 | fuck off commie | 113 | you stupid woman | 148 |
coward | 2649 | tory bullshit | 108 | stupid man | 108 |
idiots | 2632 | tory twat | 79 | you stupid man | 104 |
scum | 2324 | tory cunt | 60 | you silly man | 101 |
cunt | 2068 | tory bastards | 57 | silly man | 88 |
moron | 1979 | bloody tories | 54 | you silly woman | 78 |
piss off | 1866 | tory shit | 50 | stupid boy | 69 |
wanker | 1390 | fucking tory | 49 | silly boy | 65 |
Name | Sexist abuse | All replies | % sexist |
---|---|---|---|
Jo Swinson | 464 | 110,533 | 0.42 |
Diane Abbott | 202 | 52,279 | 0.39 |
Caroline Lucas | 165 | 26,941 | 0.61 |
Jess Phillips | 123 | 56,781 | 0.22 |
Priti Patel | 122 | 39,616 | 0.31 |
Anna Soubry | 102 | 30,912 | 0.33 |
Yvette Cooper | 58 | 11,360 | 0.51 |
Margaret Hodge | 50 | 4915 | 1.01 |