In news unlikely to surprise anyone — particularly anyone who’s recently committed the heinous crime of being a woman with a an opinion online — misogynism on the social media is alive and well.
In fact, the staggering scale of the gendered abuse has been mapped in a fun new study, which found a woman is called a ‘slut’ or ‘whore’ on Twitter every 10 seconds.
Over a three week period, British think tank Demos counted the number of times the two expletives were flung around on the platform, the answer being: a lot, apparently.
More than 200,000 aggressive tweets containing the two words (previously identified as the most commonly used) were sent worldwide — that’s around 6.6 a minute or 9,500 a day — to about 80,000 people.
The study identified some famous names among them too, including Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and Beyonce, according to the Washington Post.
But it’s not just celebrities who are subjected to vicious, gendered abuse online and it’s not just men spouting it.
In fact, research released by Demos earlier this year found 50% of the so-called ‘trolls’ were women.
A quick straw poll of our own office also found almost every one of the Mamamia team has been the victim of online vitriol, some of it funny in it’s absurdity, but most of it pretty bloody nasty.
From “bucktoothed bitch” to “filthy feminist” to alien-rat hybrid to threats of violent rape — we’ve all copped it.
Famous Australian women read mean tweets about themselves. Post continues after video…
This particular batch of research was released to coincide with a UK campaign combating online abuse, particularly of women, and calling for greater regulation of across social media platforms, not just of Twitter.
Researcher Alex Krasodomski-Jones told the BBC the findings gave “a birds-eye snapshot of what is ultimately a very personal and often traumatic experience for women.”
“We must make sure that the other big tech companies are also involved in discussions around education and developing solutions.
She added it was “a stark reminder that we are frequently not as good citizens online as we are offline”.
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