Study finds women are responsible for half of some online abuse on Twitter in UK | Hacker News Reader

Study finds women are responsible for half of some online abuse on Twitter in UK

telegraph.co.uk

113 pointsMollyR94 comments

This is self-published research by a think-tank, not a peer reviewed scholarly publication; also, the actual paper for this finding doesn't yet seem to be available, just summaries by news organizations. This article does link to some older papers by them, which go into very little detail on methodology.

As such, it's really hard to say what kind of abuse they are talking about; slut shaming and rape threats, while both awful, can be quite different. Also, I am curious about how they accurately determine gender of Twitter users; there are many fake accounts on Twitter, and I don't believe Twitter even reports gender identity of users.

Is there any research that show being peer reviewed in fact makes a difference? General speaking, I would think research should just speak for itself.

Generally speaking, you think... well that's nice. Meanwhile, in the world of the scientific method, the issue is that everyone needs to know that you didn't just write something down for fun or profit. If your results can't be replicated... thbbpt.

> If your results can't be replicated

Results aren't replicated during peer review, are they?

Not necessarily, but at least the methods can be evaluated to see how likely it is that they can be. A black box with, "Trust us, here's what we found" is weak as hell, unless you're still into Pons and Fleischmann I guess.

Strange that you believe any science that's not reproducible is science. Or assume that if the science is not reproduced, it's sciencifically valid.

Science is not a singlar effort, nor is peer review without replication.

Please question your assumptions about what science really is.

Strange that you believe any science that's not reproducible is science. Or assume that if the science is not reproduced, it's sciencifically valid.

That's the exact opposite of what I said. What's wrong with you?

What did I say that's conflicted?

Try reading the thread closely, looking for nuances you may have missed.

Depends on the publication, I believe. There was a comment here a bit ago where someone pointed out that such journals do exist (for example, Organic Synthesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_Syntheses ).

The elephant in the room with science across the board is that replication studies are not an attractive way to pull in grant money. It's a big problem!

So given how little work is done reproducing findings, there is minimal value?

It actually sounds like old research was either reproduced or simply read at a forum for stopping internet abuse (#ReclaimTheInternet) by this researcher (http://www.demos.co.uk/people/alex-krasodomski-jones-2/).

Another research paper, by a different author from the same think-tank, from 2013-14 had the same result: http://www.demos.co.uk/project/misogyny-on-twitter/

> When an article makes a politically correct claim:

"Yeah I totally feel this is true, this one time [insert anecdote here]"

> When an article makes a not-so politically correct claim:

"Well it's not peer reviewed / look at the paper that's publishing it / this is the wrong definition / headline is misleading / [insert criticism not related to the claim]"

Given the forum I'm surprised nobody has cited pg's pyramid yet, which is very relevant here.

Everyone should give this a read if they haven't already:

http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

This observation sounds like a case of confirmation bias to me. Check out this thread for multiple examples of how this "not-so politically correct claim" "makes sense" (among other thoughtful anecdotes along the trajectory of the article's headline)

but look at the ratio, way more disagreement that something like a "we need better infrastructure" article.

When the topic is politically correct people agree and argue about the edge cases. When it's not politically correct people do mental gymnastics or pile up anecdotes to discredit it.

Are we looking at the same thread? There are clearly many more comments in here expressing anecdotal confirmation of the study's findings than those suggesting the study's methods preclude it from consideration.

By time stamps, I think the first wave of comments had one tone, and the next wave of comments took the opposite tone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling

Does virtue signalling actually exist? I haven't seen any peer-reviewed papers about it.

> When an article makes a claim i like

"Yeah I totally feel this is true, this one time [insert anecdote here]"

> When an article makes a claim i don't like

"Well it's not peer reviewed / look at the paper that's publishing it / this is the wrong definition / headline is misleading / [insert criticism not related to the claim]"

It's not necessarily wrong to expect different standards of evidence for different kinds of claims, and to expect a very high standard of evidence for claims that might have profound social implications.

The problem is that it doesn't often come down to what will have profound social impacts, instead it tends to be what the loudest group of folks disagree with.

Those are two different things.

Little to do with profound social impacts, its all about how much the evidence contradicts what someone either believes or wants to believe.

Now people certainly can hide behind the idea that they only do so for profound social implications but by then they are just trying avoid acknowledging that they know whats being said is true.

there are always some socially unacceptable facts, the kind people either nod their head or just acknowledge silently. It comes from being in a society where truth is second to needs.

Assuming that the consequences of acting like X is true when X is false, are much worse than the consequences of acting like X is false when X is true, there's a subtle but important difference between saying "we should err on the side of acting as if X is false", and saying "we should be skeptical of claims that X is true"

s/politically correct/supports my preconceptions/

Headline seems a bit misleading. "Half of online abuse" seems to suggest that this study is representative of the internet as a whole instead of just twitter. While the findings are still worthwhile, I think we'd see different results if the study could have included sites like 4chan, reddit, tumblr or even facebook. Of course, there are practical challenges to getting accurate demographic information on those platforms, but I suspect that fact also factors into the nature of abuse that persists on those sites.

Additionally it wasn't looking at broad online abuse, it was looking specifically at (according to the Guardian reporting of this study) the uses of the word "slut" and "whore" in terms of online misogyny.

It's like looking at mentions of the n-word and coming to the conclusion that NWA is the more racist than the KKK.

Just like in real life, all kinds of people can be equally reprehensible to each other. It just varys in the ways. Men are typically assaultive, with in-your-face accusations and threats. Women often use exclusivity and shame as a weapon in equal parts. Because men are typically louder and more violent in their abuse, we tend to register it more often.

The title should probably reflect the fact that the study focuses specifically on Tweets containing the words "slut" and "whore"

You forgot the word "rape". It was actually "rape", "slut" and "whore"

The article says:

> Women are responsible for half of all misogynistic Tweets

> using the words "slut and whore", a new study has found.

The article isn't accurate, here's the study: http://www.demos.co.uk/project/misogyny-on-twitter/

How can they detect what somebody meant by "rape"? A big chunk of people talk about raping people in videogames every day when they mean killing their online avatars, how do they filter that out?

I can't quote for you as I am on mobile, but as the article notes the researchers used contextual analysis in their study.

A more accurate title:

Half of misogynistic abuse aimed at female twitter users in the UK found to be from other women.

The reality is that, in other countries, things may be very different. Also, this study in no way attempted to quantify all forms of online abuse. Heck, if women are this bad to each other, they may actually commit well more than half of all abuse if you include abuse aimed at males. Boys can be pretty nasty to each other too, but I suspect more of it is "offline".

I think the most important thing we can do is continue to try and bring people together by grouping them based on a single feature and then ascribing traits to them, then arguing about it on the internet. We need to keep telling our children to be nice to "black people" and "women are mean to men" and sometimes(honestly a lot of times) "men are mean to women".

We need to start censoring the internet immeadiately and NEVER identify as a diverse difficultly grouped species that cooperates and gets a long.

Now more than ever we need Democrats to hate Republicans, conservatives to hate transexuals and people who use Vim to continue to identify as the gods they are against inferior morons who use Emacs.

also, PCMaster race, if you use linux or microsoft you need to die.

This should be the next X Prize, finding interesting arbitrary (or obvious) distinctions and continuing to allow them to detract from solving real problems.

edit: inb4 Poe's law. If you didn't catch it, this is frustration-sarcasm.

The study was done globally. From the write up on the Demos website it looks like they got similar results internationally as they did in the UK (caveated by them not having released the study when I looked, just a summary).

It did provoke an interesting reaction in the Guardian. To paraphrase, if it's just men then they're sad loners picking on women. But as it's women too then it must be due to a problem in our education system. They then went on to blame our ex Education Secretary but that's probably a contractual thing for Guardian writers.

We've used your title suggestion but twisted it to fit 80 chars.

And most likely if you parsed specifically tweets containing the n word, you'd find most of said tweets are authored by black people.

Not sure what the point of this article is.

Which "n word"? Do a simple twitter search with the two spelling variants and you'll immediately notice completely different results.

I don't think that is very relevant. While the n-word is a relatively common part of african american vernacular, it is not that "slut" or "whore" are specifically part of female vernacular.

Anecdotal hand-waving BS: Something I've noticed over the last several years are people who feel so victimized in some way that they actually begin acting like their victimizer. Gay people who anonymously act violently homophobic. Black people who paint KKK images on campus property. Weird.

I'd guess it's just a very small minority of people who are like that, but online, in aggregate form, it could turn into a significant number. It'd be interesting to see some stats about this.

And then you have people like Meg Lanker-Simons

Regarding your examples: Think less Stockholm Syndrome, more Agents Provocateur.

Also related, IMO, would be politicians vehemently campaigning against X (where X is marriage equality, sexual promiscuity, abortions, or otherwise some social wedge issue), and then it turns out that the politician was directly and hypocritically involved in X.

Honestly though, equating "online abuse" to some name calling on Twitter is totally disingenuous. What about harassment and rape threats and doxing and swatting?

don't worry, females are probably responsible for half of that other stuff too.

I don't see it that way at all. I think the sort of casually calling other women slags and hoes or whatever (ie normalised internalised misogyny) is a very different ball game to the gamergate style evil shit that happens.

Why not? Look at the case of Lori Drew [0]. She cyberbullied her daughter's friend into committing suicide. Women are not incapable of committing nasty stuff on the internet.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Drew

I'm not claiming they aren't, but again, saying "probably" and assuming the iceberg extends equally the whole way down is entirely unsubstantiated.

I was merely saying that name calling and harassment are often completely different mindsets.

(Anecdotal) Doxxing long predates Gamergate and from what I've seen from BBS and hacker communities on IRC, women participate in doxxing just as much as men.

At best one could argue that there's simply less women in these communities due to societal pressures. During the past decade or so I've probably met as many transwomen as "real" women on these hacker IRCs.

However, I do believe that women are just as likely and willing to participate when they do end up in these communities. It's just that they're less likely to do so, just as they're less likely to end up working as programmers.

So what you're saying is "when women are part of a community they behave like the community"?

Then why is it so hard for people to believe that women on the internet are just as abusive as men on the internet? The internet is a community, or community of communities.

>Then why is it so hard for people to believe that women on the internet are just as abusive as men on the internet?

Is it? I don't find it hard to believe in the slightest, at least based on what I see on twitter and similar sites with a more even gender distribution.

Also, I don't believe you can draw any useful conclusions on the presence or lack of women in the aforementioned fringe communities. These communities are extremely small, and the extremes of abuse perpetrated by their members are vanishingly rare.

Why is this "evil shit" considered to be "gamergate style"?

Is it because so many anti-gamergaters engaged in it?

I agree that we need to be careful when talking about online abuse to distinguish between name calling, vicious name calling, and then threats of sexual violence or other violence. And I agree that at the severe end the perpetrators are probably mostly male.

But for one example of a woman making these extreme threats of sexual violence: one of the famous cases in the UK is the Caroline Criado Perez trolling. Two people went to jail because their tweets were so threatening and one of those people was a woman.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/twitter-trolls-is...

She got a longer sentence, because her tweets were more extreme, than the other (male) perpetrator.

Yes, absolutely. We should not equate name calling with "online abuse".

And yet every time I read a blog or article about "the scourge of online abuse!" they inevitably inflate their claims by including 'name calling' as abuse.

Re-read, dude. I said we shouldn't equate online abuse with name calling, that doesn't mean we shouldn't consider name calling online abuse, just that the definition of online abuse is not limited to name calling, which is what the headline is doing.

Edit: My point is that this kind of dishonesty is now the norm when discussing online abuse.

This actually mirrors what I've seen in the workplace over the last 35 years - women can be very brutal to each other (just like men). The main difference I've observed is that men tend to forgive each other and move on. Women seem more likely to hold a grudge. I'm obviously not interested in making sweeping generalizations - and this is not a scientific study.

> I'm obviously not interested in making sweeping generalizations

That is not obvious to me given the antecedent observations that ultimately brought us to this claim.

What I meant is that these characteristics were observed in only the small number of workplaces that have employed me. And I could have gone on to correlate these behaviors to other characteristics but purposely didn't do that. More importantly, I could elicit corroboration from others who worked in these locations including the woman who first pointed this trend out to me.

Of course, the better technique would be to collect aanonymized data from a wide range of HR departments and look for statistical trends. When complete you'd still see biases ... just like only studying trends by analyzing Twitter.

That makes much more sense but wasn't clear from the way you put that.

I do kind of wonder whether sock-puppet accounts were a significant factor. I wouldn't necessarily expect them to follow the same gender distribution as the folks abusing.

I'd like to know what percentage of online abuse was directed at women. My hunch would have been 50/50 for dealing it out, but I am not so sure the split is even for taking it.

The article does link to one investigation from The Guardian about abusive comments left on articles written by journalists whose genders are known.

I don't know, then. The Guardian is a leftist newspaper that is known for posting articles written by feminist trolls as a bait.

https://i.imgur.com/9sxIFSP.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/Ve6XWIa.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/3VWWYqZ.jpg

Obviously, with articles like these, what kind of comments do they expect?

I'm rather doubtful about what conclusions can be drawn from that investigation, given that it doesn't really present much clear data. It measures how many comments moderators have deleted, assuming most deleted comments are abusive. Sometimes moderators go rogue and start deleting large numbers of comments that are not abusive but which they don't like for some other reason, leading to more people posting the same comments, leading to more deletions. It's as much a study of moderator behaviour as of commenter behaviour.

Eg. I saw huge numbers of comments deleted for saying a lot of redditors turned against Ellen Pao because of the perception that she sacked Victoria Taylor. Which doesn't seem abusive to me.

I thought this was consistent with prevaling theories on how sexism works, and how abuse works more broadly?

There's a kindergarten-esque explanation of the phenomenon: humans tend to imitate each other, and we imitate more the people we're around more, and the targets of abuse tend to be around their abusers (or women in an abusive society) so they become like them.

It's not entirely accurate, but similar phenomena are known, most infamously the correlation between being abused as a child and:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_violence#Intergenerati...

Why wouldn't they frame the title as "Men and women are equally responsible for misogynistic tweets" instead of singling out women?

The popular myth is that men are responsible for the majority of online abuse. Its more dramatic to phrase the claim in a way that is more explicit in contradicting this myth.

Because they're countering the popular perception that men are responsible for the lion's share of online mysogyny. It's the trued and true 'Everything you thought you knew about the world is wrong, click here to find out why!' style of headline. The Telegraph does have a business to run, after all. A little bit of sensationalism is good for the bottom line.

trying to see the good in things, perhaps this bodes well for gender equality, suggesting (psychological underpinnings of the aggressors aside) that there is less bias in the feeling of personal empowerment on the internet.

Equality between genders is unlikely, there will likely always be imbalances one way or another. Studies like this to me help counter myths related to gender though, which is important; aka science is good.

this is super important research the institute for social media has conducted. the biggest threats humanity has ever faced are 140 charachters.

I have an adequate supply of bile for the social justice advocates but this isn't a news story that plays against their beliefs.

If you exclude the mob then the majority of them would say that many women have internalized misogyny.

This isn't a fantastic claim as it may at first sound. Many people thinks ill of themselves, many people also hate themselves on a group level. The stereotype of the self hating Jew has some basis in fact. Each nation has people who dislike the people within it despite being members of it.

It is possible to hate your own class, race or culture. It is reasonable to extend that to sex.

I think like with many things there is often a reasonable kernel of truth to why you'd choose to go against your own tribe, but taken too far it can slip over into irrationality.

I am working class but I see a lot of toxic behaviors in it. It is true for example that they are more violent. On the flip side I would also say they are less dishonest than the middle class and much more reliable when the going gets tough. Many middle class people have noticed their neighours flake out easily over little things.

Of course I don't hate my class but at one point as a teen I struggled with it until I realized the other classes have their own suite of flaws as well, they're just less obvious to outsiders.

The most important thing.

Remember that in proximity like competes with like. If you understand this you'll see why the SJWs eat their young, why siblings fight and why in civil wars you're more likely to get attacked by some group that is more similar than different.

If you compete for the same resource you develop enemies. The modern focus on xenophobia ignores the internal competition. The No.1 enemy to Bernie Sanders supporters is Hilary until the nomination, and then Trump. Something like ISIS is at the end of a long list. This truth also explains the existence of fellow travelers.

When you get attacked by a foreign faction everybody joins together. The SJWs unite against non-SJWs. The siblings band together against bullies. The Sunnis and Shias band together as Muslims when faced with western forces. That's why many strategists think an alien invasion would generate world peace!

I'm sure you remember if you're old enough that shortly after 9/11 everybody bought flags. That day was when they realized they were in Team America. People who betray their tribe for whatever reason get torn to pieces because an enemy can use divide and conquer tactics to destroy all of you.

Evidence for my claim would probably be found in the study above. Those women are attacking other women, not other men.

A woman calling another a whore is misogyny? Being against promiscuity is misogyny?

Being against female promiscuity while praising or ignoring male promiscuity is definitely misogyny.

Edit: Additionally, being against both in the current society is, while not necessarily misogynist in itself, contributing to a misogynistic society - there's many more people who will speak up to tell a man that the weird-ass person who told them they're bad for being promiscuous is wrong then would tell a woman the same, the result being that telling a woman that she's bad for enjoying sex has more impact than telling a man the same. You don't actually see many masculine-gendered terms for shaming the enjoyment of sex, and those that do exist are not used in a derogatory context very often.

And how do you detect that with a bot that just skims through tweets? Nonsense.

Well, how do you know that "whore" in all these cases was used as an insult to promiscuity, rather than a generic insult (with a certain bite) as it's more generally used, where a less sexually-focused insult might be used against men?

We could, of course, just point out that this is a terrible study in general.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778783 and marked it off-topic.

It makes sense.

A 'whore/slut' women in a society has the most destructive effect on other women's sexual prospect. So I am surprised that there is a taboo against that - the only thing that surprised me is when men think its a bad thing - since it doesn't hurt them having many sexually adventurous women around.

It's probably about control of their partner.

80-20 rule, society runs more smoothly when the 80 gets laid more often.

A month from now there will be a debate/argument in HN comments about women being harassed online, someone will claim something along the lines of most online insults toward women are posted by men and someone will link this article. Tune in to next month's broadcast to see who gets down voted into oblivion, the person making the unsubstantiated claim or the person rebutting it.

In my almost 40 years of living, I've learned one thing about women, they love attention, and you better learn when is necessary to give it to them and when is better for both if you ignore them.

True but trivial, in that what you say is also true for men.

It might still be useful to say, since some men occasionally need reminding that women are humans with human behavior.

>since some men occasionally need reminding that women are humans with human behavior.

I never implied the contrary.

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