With media so heavily focused on bad men, you might begin to think that there aren’t any good ones left. To find out if this was the case, Twitter user @emrazz addressed their 137K followers, asking all males to share their experience in standing up to misogyny.
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Seeing this kind of activity on Twitter is especially interesting. The social network was dubbed as “a toxic place for women” by Amnesty International after the organization conducted a study there. Calling it Troll Patrol, the researchers used crowdsourcing, data sience & machine learning to “measure violence and abuse against women on Twitter.”
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“Our findings reveal the sheer scale and nature of online abuse faced by women and provide a resource to researchers and engineers interested in exploring the potential of machine learning in content moderation,” Amnesty International wrote. “These findings are the result of a collaboration between Amnesty International and Element AI, a global artificial intelligence software product company. Together, we surveyed millions of tweets received by 778 journalists and politicians from the UK and US throughout 2017 representing a variety of political views, and media spanning the ideological spectrum. Using cutting-edge data science and machine learning techniques, we were able to provide a quantitative analysis of the unprecedented scale of online abuse against women in the UK and USA.”
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Together, they found out that “7.1% of tweets sent to the women in the study were ‘problematic’ or ‘abusive.’ This amounts to 1.1 million tweets mentioning 778 women across the year, or one every 30 seconds.”
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Furthermore, women of color, (black, Asian, Latinx and mixed-race women) were 34% more likely to be mentioned in abusive or problematic tweets than white women. “Black women were disproportionately targeted, being 84% more likely than white women to be mentioned in abusive or problematic tweets.”
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Among its conclusions, the study stated that “Twitter’s data states that 2.8 million unique accounts were reported for abuse of which Twitter actioned 248,000 – approximately 9%. However, the data published only reflects unique accounts that were reported for abuse and actioned. Twitter should also publish the total number of tweets reported for abuse and hateful conduct – disaggregated by category – in order to avoid potentially underplaying the true scale of abuse on the platform.”