Study: '50% of Misogynistic Tweets From Women' (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A study performed by researchers behind the Internet campaign "Reclaim," suggests that half of all misogynistic tweets posted on Twitter come from women. The campaign is designed to show the public the impact of hate speech and abuse on social media. They have opened an online forum to discuss ways to make the internet less aggressive, sexist, racist and homophobic. For the study, thinktank Demos counted the number of uses of "slut" and "whore" were used on Twitter to indicate misogyny. They analyzed 1.5 million tweets sent by UK Twitter users over a three-week period and used its own Natural Language Processing tool to filter the tweets in order to determine whether they were used aggressively, conversationally, or for self-identification. Demos found 6,500 unique users being targeted by 10,000 explicitly aggressive and misogynistic tweets. Internationally, they recorded more than 200,000 aggressive tweets using the same terms that were sent to 80,000 people in the same three-week period. It claims it found 50 percent of the abusive tweets to have come from women. BBC also notes a study performed in 2014 from cosmetics firm Dove that found over five million negative tweets were posted about beauty and body image. Four out of five of those tweets were sent by women.

Comments

Re:Misandry

[whoozwah]

I don't know why this is downvoted. The message of "stop the insanity" is a sound one.

Re:Misandry

[quantaman]

So when do they study misandry and start to treat that as seriously as misogyny? You can't be gender inclusive when you officially ignore hate speech and discrimination against half the population.

When it's as serious a problem as misogyny.

I'm not saying to ignore misandry, it should be studied and I'm sure people are studying it. But misogyny, especially online, is far more prevalent, arguably a much bigger problem, and rightly deserves the majority of the attention.