Twitter Is Rife With ‘Misogyny.’ One Problem: Half Of It Comes From Women.

A new study by Demos, a thinktank in the United Kingdom, shows that, yes, Twitter is still fertile with misogynistic harassment but men aren’t sole culprits commiting the abuse. The findings show that women are responsible for half of the hate spewed toward females on the social network platform.

According to TechCrunch,

“Demos’ study analysed 1.5 million tweets sent by UK Twitter users over the period April 23 to May 15 2016 which included the words ‘slut’ or ‘whore’. The thinktank then used its own in-house Natural Language Processing tool to filter the collected tweets in order to differentiate between actively aggressive, conversational and self-identification uses of the two terms.

Over the three-week collection period it says it found 6,500 unique users being targeted by 10,000 explicitly aggressive and misogynistic tweets.

While, internationally, it says more than 200,000 aggressive tweets using the same terms were sent to 80,000 people in the same three-week period.

It also claims it found 50 per cent of the propagators of the abusive tweets to be women…

Alex Krasodomski-Jones, a researcher with Demos said in a released statement, “While we have focused on Twitter, who are considerably more generous in sharing their data with researchers like us, it’s important to note that misogyny is prevalent across all social media, and we must make sure that the other big tech companies are also involved in discussions around education and developing solutions. This is less about policing the internet than it is a stark reminder that we are frequently not as good citizens online as we are offline.”

Newsweek notes:

“The research comes as five U.K. MPs—Yvette Cooper, Maria Miller, Stella Creasy, Jo Swinson and Jess Phillips—launch their Reclaim the Internet campaign, in response to growing public concern about the impact of hate speech and abuse on social media.

The campaign has opened an online forum to discuss ways to make the internet less aggressive, sexist, racist and homophobic.”

Exit thought by Joseph Stalin…