Contributions to reducing online gender harassment: Social re-norming and appealing to empathy as tried-and-failed techniques

Abstract

Inspired by similar methods shown to be effective in reducing online racist harassment, we designed two tweets aimed at reducing online gender harassment. Our interventions were based on the principles of social re-norming and appealing to harassers’ empathy. In a sample of 666 Twitter users engaging in sexist or misogynist tweeting, we found that our intervention tweets did not reduce the number of sexist slurs or sexist users, either 7 days or 31 days after being sent. Our attempts also affected neither the valence nor the arousal of subsequent tweets posted by our sample of Twitter users. We discuss the conceptual, methodological, and ethical challenges associated with activist research aimed at reducing online gender harassment and discuss some of the implications of our attempts to do so.