Women Abused On Twitter Every 30 Seconds, Study Finds
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PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- A new study reveals that women are abused on Twitter every 30 seconds.
Amnesty International found that 1.1 million abusive or problematic tweets were sent to women in the study in 2017.
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"With the help of technical experts and thousands of volunteers, we have built the world's largest crowdsourced dataset about online abuse against women. Troll Patrol means we have the data to back up what women have long been telling us – that Twitter is a place where racism, misogyny and homophobia are allowed to flourish basically unchecked," said Milena Marin, senior adviser for tactical research at Amnesty International.
Amnesty International says volunteers went through 288,000 tweets sent to 778 women politicians and journalists in the United States and United Kingdom from last year.
The study also found that African-American women were 84 percent more likely to be mentioned in these tweets.
"We found that, although abuse is targeted at women across the political spectrum, women of color 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 Marin.
