Female black journalists and politicians get sent an abusive tweet every 30 secs | Hacker News Reader

Female black journalists and politicians get sent an abusive tweet every 30 secs

technologyreview.com

> It found that 1.1 million abusive tweets were sent to the 778 women in this period—that’s the equivalent of one every 30 seconds.

That's one per 30 seconds for all 778 women combined. Per woman, it's 1 per 6.5 hours.

The article doesn't seem to give a direct link to ElementAI's findings.

Summary: https://www.elementai.com/fr/news/2018/recherches-sur-twitte...

Detailed findings: https://decoders.amnesty.org/projects/troll-patrol/findings

The study was exclusively focused on women and a men-vs-women comparative analysis was outside their scope.

Some interesting results:

- While left-leaning female politicians received slightly more abuse than right-leaning female politicians, there is a much stronger and opposite disparity for journalists. Right-leaning female journalists receive more abuse than left-leaning female journalists -- the gap is triple that of the left/right politician gap. Does anyone know what might be the cause?

(as an aside, the mouseover for seeing the exact percentages was really annoying; the percentage for female right-leaning journalists kept getting covered up by the text interpretation).

The text summaries of the data also seem to have slightly non-synonymous interpretations:

>6.57% of all mentions of journalists working for left leaning media groups were problematic or abusive

>Journalists working for right leaning media groups were mentioned in 64% more problematic and abusive tweets than journalists working at left leaning organisations

>Left leaning politicians receive 23% more problematic and abusive mentions that their counterparts in right-leaning parties

>6.18% of all mentions of right leaning politicians were problematic or abusive

It almost sounds like making a distinction between "receiving abusive mentions" and "being mentioned in an abusive tweet."

- Regarding the breakdown of abusive mentions for different races, Latinas seem significantly lower in receiving abusive tweets than the mean (White, Asian, Mixed-race) -- with Black women significantly higher, as reported in the article. Does anyone know if there are social explanations for why that would be the case?

> - While left-leaning female politicians received slightly more abuse than right-leaning female politicians, there is a much stronger and opposite disparity for journalists. Right-leaning female journalists receive more abuse than left-leaning female journalists -- the gap is triple that of the left/right politician gap. Does anyone know what might be the cause?

Perhaps right-leaning people not being as abusive towards left-leaning journalists as left-leaning people being abusive towards right-leaning journalists.

IMHO most right-leaning people are too busy getting on with their lives and being successful to bother with being angry at opposing viewpoints. I could be wrong, though.

Given the Russians record of devisive activity i would like to know what percentage of these are by the Russians

We can't externalize every manifestation of how shitty we are as human beings.

It's not Russians. It's the people you're surrounded by every day-- you, your family, your kids, your co-workers and your neighbors.

There are plenty of people alive who were around for the signing of the Civil Rights Act. The fact that it was necessary as domestic policy should tell you where the source of the problem lies.

So I get what your saying, but this is actually an interesting question and dismissing it out of hand stretches the bounds of good faith.

I'm curious why you didn't discuss the interesting question and instead focused on the rebuttal.

I would suspect not as much as you might expect. My reasoning for this comes from the fact that right-leaning female journalists are attacked three times more than left-leaning female journalists. This doesn't follow the media's viewpoint that the Russians were backing the Republicans/Republican candidate.

I wonder how much is correlation or causation. Perhaps female black journalists tend to write about more controversial topics than other journalists.

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