According to an Amnesty International study, 778 black female politicians and journalists in the U.K. and U.S. were abused on Twitter in the past year.
The study, released on December 18th, 2018, said the women received 1.1 million abusive or problematic tweets, roughly translating into to one every 30 seconds.
“We found that, although abuse is targeted at women across the political spectrum, women of colour were much more likely to be impacted, and black women are disproportionately targeted. Twitter’s failure to crack down on this problem means it is contributing to the silencing of already marginalized voices,” said Milena Marin, senior adviser for tactical research at Amnesty, in a press release.
Amnesty said it worked with Element AI, an artificial intelligence software company, and got over 6,000 volunteers to sign up and take part in Troll Patrol, a project that is “designed to process large-scale data about online abuse.”
Amnesty said it used advanced data science and machine learning to get the information from 288,000 tweets. The study did note that the abuse “cuts across the political spectrum,” including liberals and conservatives, and also included left and right-leaning media organizations.
Source: Amnesty International
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