Over one million abusive messages sent to women on Twitter last year, says report

Over one million abusive messages were sent to women on Twitter last year.

A new Amnesty International report has shown that 1.1 million abusive or problematic tweets were sent to or mentioned female politicians and journalists during 2017. This amounts to one tweet every 30 seconds. The report considered 288,000 tweets sent to 778 female politicians and journalists in the UK and USA in 2017. A crowdsourcing project called Troll Patrol used 6,500 volunteers from 150 countries to process the tweets. It found that black women were disproportionately targeted, being 84 percent more likely to receive an abusive tweet than a white woman. One in ten tweets mentioning black women were abusive or problematic, compared to one in fifteen for white women. All of the women involved in the study received abuse irrespective of their political leaning or their spot on the political spectrum. The study found that Twitter's failure to address this issue is contributing to the "silencing of already marginalised voices." Milena Marin, Senior Advisor for Tactical Research at Amnesty International said that Twitter is allowing misogyny, homophobia, and racism to "flourish basically unchecked." “We found that, although abuse is targeted at women across the political spectrum, women of colour were much more likely to be impacted, and black women are disproportionately targeted," she said. "Twitter’s failure to crack down on this problem means it is contributing to the silencing of already marginalized voices. “Troll Patrol isn’t about policing Twitter or forcing it to remove content. We are asking it to be more transparent, and we hope that the findings from Troll Patrol will compel it to make that change." Twitter has since responded to the report requesting Amnesty International's definition of the word "problematic."