Vindication, virtue, and vitriol

Abstract

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.

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

“…This paper makes a contribution to the longitudinal comparison of abuse trends toward UK politicians. Since the same data collection and abuse detection method was used to analyse previous levels of abuse towards MPs in the run-up to the 2017 and 2019 UK General Elections [1] and during the first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK [2], this research not only presents new findings, but is also able to corroborate findings of our own previous studies an other related studies.…”

“…In a special issue related to online harm during COVID-19, editors Ferrara, Cresci and Luceri [3] comment that COVID-19 has been an "unprecedented setting for the spread of online misinformation, manipulation, and abuse, with the potential to cause dramatic real-world consequences". Our previous work, however, was inconclusive about the overall impact of COVID-19 on abuse levels towards UK MPs, due to the novelty of the situation and compassion during Boris Johnson's illness [2]. Abuse toward politicians was at an all-time low during Johnson's illness, as he usually features quite prominently in the data because of his role [1].…”

“…Table 1 shows the current period covered by this paper, from June -December 2020. Table 2 shows a comparison with the previous COVID-19 periods we studied from February -May 2020 [2], Table 3 shows a comparative table for periods studied before and during the 2017 and 2019 General Elections. We can see that the stress from COVID-19 and the Brexit negotiations correspond with higher levels of abuse toward British MPs during the current period studied, particularly in October and December.…”

“…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.…”

“…This white paper charts Twitter abuse in replies to UK MPs between June and December 2020, which is a follow-up from our analysis of online abuse during the first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK [2]. 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.…”