Gorrell, G. orcid.org/0000-0002-8324-606X, Bakir, M.E., Roberts, I. et al. (2 more authors) (2020) Which politicians receive abuse? Four factors illuminated in the UK general election 2019. EPJ Data Science, 9. 18.
Abstract
The 2019 UK general election took place against a background of rising online hostility levels toward politicians, and concerns about the impact of this on democracy, as a record number of politicians cited the abuse they had been receiving as a reason for not standing for re-election. We present a four-factor framework in understanding who receives online abuse and why. The four factors are prominence, events, online engagement and personal characteristics. We collected 4.2 million tweets sent to or from election candidates in the six week period spanning from the start of November until shortly after the December 12th election. We found abuse in 4.46% of replies received by candidates, up from 3.27% in the matching period for the 2017 UK general election. Abuse levels have also been climbing month on month throughout 2019. Abuse also escalated throughout the campaign period. Abuse focused mainly on a small number of high profile politicians, with the most prominent individuals receiving not only more abuse by volume, but also as a percentage of replies. Abuse is ``spiky'', triggered by external events such as debates, or certain tweets. Some tweets may become viral targets for personal abuse. On average, men received more general and political abuse; women received more sexist abuse. Conservative candidates received more political and general abuse. We find that individuals choosing not to stand for re-election had received more abuse across the preceding year.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2020 The Authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | UK general election; online abuse; cyber-bullying; twitter; politics |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Computer Science (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 25 Jun 2020 07:51 |
Last Modified: | 13 Jul 2020 11:12 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer / EDP Sciences |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1140/epjds/s13688-020-00236-9 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:162172 |