Misogyny, politics, and social media determinants of hostile engagement against women parliamentarians on Twitter

Abstract

Politicians use social media to engage directly with the public using diverse communication styles including aggressive or uncivil language. Yet, little is known about gender differences in politicians' communication styles and their subsequent online reactions. In this study, we investigate whether women politicians who use critical or insulting language on Twitter face disproportionate backlash compared to men politicians. To test our hypothesis, we employ a self-developed supervised language classifier to categorize @-mentions of parliamentarians into two incivility levels: criticism and insults. We find that men and women MPs tweet with a similar level of incivility, including both critical and insulting language. For critical language, we find that both men and women MPs receive more critical responses when sending a higher number of critical tweets. In the case of insulting language, we find evidence of a gendered pattern: Compared to men MPs, women MPs receive a higher number of insulting tweets but can reduce such responses to a small degree when being more insulting themselves. These findings underscore that female MPs navigate a more hostile online environment that compels them to use more insulting language as a means of self-defense.