One Tweet in Seven: Amnesty Measures the Abuse Aimed at India's Women in Politics
A crowdsourced Amnesty International study of India's 2019 general election found that about one in seven tweets mentioning a woman politician was problematic or abusive. Muslim women and those from marginalized castes were targeted far more heavily than their peers.
Amnesty International published the findings on 23 January 2020 in a report titled “Troll Patrol India: Exposing Online Abuse Faced by Women Politicians in India.” The study examined more than 114,000 tweets sent to 95 women politicians during and after the country's 2019 general election, according to Amnesty International.
Of the tweets analyzed, 13.8 percent — roughly one in seven — were classified as problematic or abusive, The News Minute reported, citing the report. That amounted to an average of 113 problematic or abusive tweets per woman per day, according to coverage of the study by CNN.
How the abuse was measured
Amnesty compiled the data through Troll Patrol India, a crowdsourcing project in which volunteers reviewed and labeled tweets. More than 1,900 digital volunteers from 82 countries took part, according to The News Minute.
The report drew a distinction between two categories of content, as CNN reported. “Problematic” tweets were defined as hurtful or hostile content that did not necessarily meet the threshold of abuse, while “abusive” tweets were those that promoted violence against, or threatened, people on the basis of their identity, such as race, gender or religion.
Muslim and lower-caste women hit hardest
The study found the abuse was not spread evenly. Muslim women politicians received 94.1 percent more ethnic or religious slurs than women politicians from other religions, according to The News Minute, citing the report.
Women from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes received 59 percent more caste-based abuse than women from general castes, the same report found. Amnesty said the pattern showed that women were targeted not only for their opinions but for identities such as gender, religion and caste, according to Amnesty International.
A higher rate than in the West
The 13.8 percent figure was nearly double the rate Amnesty had recorded in a comparable 2018 study of women politicians in the United Kingdom and the United States, which found 7.1 percent of tweets to be problematic or abusive, The News Minute reported. Amnesty said the volume of abuse risked driving women out of public debate, warning that online hostility can push targets to self-censor or withdraw, according to Amnesty International.