Race and Religion in Online Abuse towards UK Politicians: Working Paper

Gorrell, Genevieve; Bakir, Mehmet E.; Greenwood, Mark; Roberts, Ian; Bontcheva, Kalina

doi:10.48550/arxiv.1910.00920

Cited by 5 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 30 publications

(31 reference statements)

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“…Rees-Mogg was also involved in a public critique of Unicef, which has offered to provide free meals to school children, when it appeared the British parliament would not provide them. Mogg accused Unicef of "playing politics" [5] . Priti Patel has typically attracted abuse for strong language around migration policies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Wales had the firebreak lockdown. Anger over lockdown boiled [4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52897865 [5] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55354958 [6] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55026137 07-J un 14-J un 21-J un 28-J un 05-J ul over into protests on the 24th in London with tens of thousands of participants.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous work on abuse directed at UK MPs indicated that hostility toward MPs was rising [4,5,6,7], particularly in relation to contentious issues, like the European referendum, the Brexit crisis and inequality [2]. Ward and McLoughlin [8] found previously that language that could be classified as hate-speech was rather low, however, in comparison to more generally uncivil language.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Women were more likely to be stereotyped by identity (men by party) and to be questioned in their position as an MP. Gorrell et al [5] noted in addition that the impacts or consequences of abusive language are not manifesting in the same ways for male and female MPs, or MPs with intersectional identities of race and gender. Where some abuse is distressing, other abuse is personal, threatening and limits women's participation in the public office [5,10,11].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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MP Twitter Engagement and Abuse Post-first COVID-19 Lockdown in the UK: White Paper

Farrell,

Bakir,

Bontcheva

2021

Preprint

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The UK has had a volatile political environment for some years now, with Brexit and leadership crises marking the past five years. With this work, we wanted to understand more about how the global health emergency, COVID-19, influences the amount, type or topics of abuse that UK politicians receive when engaging with the public. This work covers the period of June -December 2020 and analyses Twitter abuse in replies to UK MPs. This work is a follow-up from our analysis of online abuse during the first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. The paper examines overall abuse levels during this new seven month period, analyses reactions to members of different political parties and the UK government, and the relationship between online abuse and topics such as Brexit, government's COVID-19 response and policies, and social issues.In addition, we have also examined the presence of conspiracy theories posted in abusive replies to MPs during the period. We have found that abuse levels toward UK MPs were at an all-time high in December 2020 (5.4% of all reply tweets sent to MPs). This is almost 1% higher that the two months preceding the General Election. In a departure from the trend seen in the first four months of the pandemic, MPs from the Tory party received the highest percentage of abusive replies from July 2020 onward, which stays above 5% starting from September 2020 onward, as the COVID-19 crisis deepened and the Brexit negotiations with the EU started nearing completion.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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MP Twitter Engagement and Abuse Post-first COVID-19 Lockdown in the UK: White Paper

Farrell,

Bakir,

Bontcheva

2021

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…The contribution of this study is to understand both the content and context of abusive and hateful communication, particularly toward governments and authorities during a health crisis. Our focus, UK MPs, adds to a growing longitudinal body of work that analyses online abuse at many key moments in British politics from 2015 to the present [29,23,5,66].…”

Section: Contributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vindication, Virtue and Vitriol: A study of online engagement and abuse toward British MPs during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Farrell¹,

Gorrell²,

Bontcheva³

2020

Preprint

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has given rise to malicious content online, including online abuse and hate toward British MPs. In order to understand and contextualise the level of abuse MPs receive, we consider how ministers use social media to communicate about the crisis, and the citizen engagement that this generates. The focus of the paper is on a large-scale, mixed methods study of abusive and antagonistic responses to UK politicians during the pandemic from early February to late May 2020. We find that pressing subjects such as financial concerns attract high levels of engagement, but not necessarily abusive dialogue. Rather, criticising authorities appears to attract higher levels of abuse. In particular, those who carry the flame for subjects like racism and inequality, may be accused of virtue signalling or receive higher abuse levels due to the topics they are required by their role to address. This work contributes to the wider understanding of abusive language online, in particular that which is directed at public officials.

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Misogynoir: challenges in detecting intersectional hate

Kwarteng

Perfumi

Farrell

et al. 2022

Soc. Netw. Anal. Min.

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Abstract“Misogynoir” is a term that refers to the anti-Black forms of misogyny that Black women experience. To explore how current automated hate speech detection approaches perform in detecting this type of hate, we evaluated the performance of two state-of-the-art detection tools, HateSonar and Google’s Perspective API, on a balanced dataset of 300 tweets, half of which are examples of misogynoir and half of which are examples of supporting Black women and an imbalanced dataset of 3138 tweets of which 162 tweets are examples of misogynoir and 2976 tweets are examples of allyship tweets. We aim to determine if these tools flag these messages under any of their classifications of hateful speech (e.g. “hate speech”, “offensive language”, “toxicity” etc.). Close analysis of the classifications and errors shows that current hate speech detection tools are ineffective in detecting misogynoir. They lack sensitivity to context, which is an essential component for misogynoir detection. We found that tweets likely to be classified as hate speech explicitly reference racism or sexism or use profane or aggressive words. Subtle tweets without references to these topics are more challenging to classify. We find that the lack of sensitivity to context may make such tools not only ineffective but potentially harmful to Black women.

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Race and Religion in Online Abuse towards UK Politicians: Working Paper

Cited by 5 publications

References 30 publications

MP Twitter Engagement and Abuse Post-first COVID-19 Lockdown in the UK: White Paper

MP Twitter Engagement and Abuse Post-first COVID-19 Lockdown in the UK: White Paper

Vindication, Virtue and Vitriol: A study of online engagement and abuse toward British MPs during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Misogynoir: challenges in detecting intersectional hate

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