Twitter isn’t kind to Black women. According to a new study by Amnesty International, women of color were 34 percent more likely to be the targets of harassment than white women. And of the women of color, Black women were targeted the most. “One in every 10 tweets sent to them was abusive or problematic, whereas for white women it was one in 15,” Wired reported.
The study examined 778 women journalists and politicians living in the US and UK and about 7.1 percent of tweets sent to these female journalists during 2017 were abusive or problematic.
“We found that, although abuse is targeted at women across the political spectrum, women of color were much more likely to be impacted and black women are disproportionately targeted. Twitter’s failure to crack down on this problem means it is contributing to the silencing of already marginalized voices,” said Milena Marin, senior adviser for tactical research at Amnesty International, said in a statement.
Amnesty International says such online abuse against women is a human rights issue, and as such had repeatedly urged Twitter to release “meaningful information about reports of violence and abuse against women, as well as other groups, on the platform, and how they respond to it.” So far, Twitter has refused.
It did issue a response to the study: “Abuse, malicious automation, and manipulation detract from the health of Twitter,” Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s legal, policy, and trust and safety lead, wrote. “We are committed to holding ourselves publicly accountable toward progress in this regard.”
Now, Amnesty has taken action. It launched an interactive website called the Troll Patrol. Through this, “more than 6,500 volunteers from 150 countries helped label a subset of 288,000 tweets (out of 14.5 million) that had been sent to the 778 women between January and December of 2017,” Wired reported. The volunteers looked for tweets that promote violence against or threats to people based on their identification with a group, like race or gender. Such Tweets are supposed to violate Twitter’s TOS.
“We have built the world’s largest crowdsourced data set about online abuse against women,” Marin said. “We have the data to back up what women have long been telling us—that Twitter is a place where racism, misogyny and homophobia are allowed to flourish basically unchecked.”
Race played a major factor in the abusive tweets. According to the Troll Patrol’s findings, of the 778 journalists and politicians, 84 percent of Black women were more likely to be targets of abusive tweets than white women and Asian women were the most likely to receive threats mentioning ethnic, racial, and religious slurs.
“Journalists working for right-leaning media groups like Daily Mail, the Sun or Breitbart were mentioned in 64 percent more problematic and abusive tweets than journalists working at left leaning organizations like The New York Times,” the study found.
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