Turds, traitors and tossers: the abuse of UK MPs via Twitter

Ward, Stephen; McLoughlin, Liam

doi:10.1080/13572334.2020.1730502

Cited by 39 publications

(65 citation statements)

References 50 publications

(32 reference statements)

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“…During the COVID-19 pandemic, we can see a similar effect, for example, the wearing of face-coverings as a personal versus social choice, 16 and participation in protest versus public health. 17 Increased name recognition and popularity have also been associated with higher levels of abuse in both the cases of Brexit and General Elections [30,34,51,74]. Our COVID-19 data show similar trends.…”

Section: Political Authoritysupporting

confidence: 53%

“…There is a considerable amount of historical data on the prevalence of online abuse directed at British MPs, particularly on Twitter. Previous work [6,28,34,75] has shown rising levels of hostility towards UK politicians on Twitter, particularly in the context of divisive issues, such as Brexit or inequality. Partisan operators have been implicated in fanning the flames with malicious content, such as misinformation or troll accounts [31].…”

Section: Hate and Abuse Of British Mps Onlinementioning

confidence: 96%

“…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 [6,28,34,75]. In the following sections, we begin with a description of the current context and a brief summary of related work.…”

Section: Contributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ranking tweets by the most replies will surface prominent individuals, but perhaps not always polarising individuals or viewpoints. We decided on an initial criterion that a tweet had to have received 8% or more abusive replies, which is nearly twice the average level of abuse noted by [29,34,75]. In addition, to filter out tweets that were attracting just a handful of abusive replies, we examined tweets that received at least 20 abusive replies.…”

Section: Thematic Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Vindication, virtue, and vitriol

2020

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COVID-19 has given rise to a lot of malicious content online, including hate speech, online abuse, and misinformation. British MPs have also received abuse and hate on social media during this time. To understand and contextualise the level of abuse MPs receive, we consider how ministers use social media to communicate about the pandemic, 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 on Twitter, 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 during this period of the pandemic. In addition, communicating about subjects like racism and inequality may result in accusations of virtue signalling or pandering by some users. This work contributes to the wider understanding of abusive language online, in particular that which is directed at public officials.

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Section: Political Authoritysupporting

confidence: 53%

Section: Hate and Abuse Of British Mps Onlinementioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Contributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Thematic Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Vindication, virtue, and vitriol

2020

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“…Gorrell et al [11] compare similar data from both the 2015 and 2017 UK general elections. Ward et al [12] explore a two and a half month period running from late 2016 to early 2017. Greenwood et al [13] extends work presented by Gorrell et al [11] to span four years.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Which politicians receive abuse? Four factors illuminated in the UK general election 2019

et al. 2020

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The 2019 UK general election took place against a background of rising online hostility levels toward politicians, and concerns about the impact of this on democracy, as a record number of politicians cited the abuse they had been receiving as a reason for not standing for re-election. We present a four-factor framework in understanding who receives online abuse and why. The four factors are prominence, events, online engagement and personal characteristics. We collected 4.2 million tweets sent to or from election candidates in the six week period spanning from the start of November until shortly after the December 12th election. We found abuse in 4.46% of replies received by candidates, up from 3.27% in the matching period for the 2017 UK general election. Abuse levels have also been climbing month on month throughout 2019. Abuse also escalated throughout the campaign period. Abuse focused mainly on a small number of high profile politicians, with the most prominent individuals receiving not only more abuse by volume, but also as a percentage of replies. Abuse is "spiky", triggered by external events such as debates, or certain tweets. Some tweets may become viral targets for personal abuse. On average, men received more general and political abuse; women received more sexist abuse. Conservative candidates received more political and general abuse. We find that individuals choosing not to stand for re-election had received more abuse across the preceding year.

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MPs: ‘Players’ and ‘Problems’

Miller

2021

Gender and Politics

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This chapter explores an array of parliamentary activities to understand how both men and women MPs as gendered actors are positioned in the everyday parliamentary workplace. The fieldwork was conducted during a period of institutionalisation of democratic practices within the UK House of Commons Select Committee system. Whilst these democratic processes, notably elections to chair positions have widely been praised for improving the standing of the select committee system by moving the power of appointment away from party whips, the dynamics of gender in these changes, such as in elections and performing leadership, makes for a timely investigation and highlights some intricate power relations. The chapter then explores how citizenship is performed in the informal spaces of the House of Commons: in practices of time management, the domestic committees of the House of Commons and journalist relationships. Finally, the chapter explores how gender is performed in place of the lack of a job description and in the context of a lack of a gender lens to online and offline accountabilities.

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Turds, traitors and tossers: the abuse of UK MPs via Twitter

Cited by 39 publications

References 50 publications

Vindication, virtue, and vitriol

Vindication, virtue, and vitriol

Which politicians receive abuse? Four factors illuminated in the UK general election 2019

MPs: ‘Players’ and ‘Problems’

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