UK MPs flayed more after terror strikes
Abusive tweets targeting British MPs doubled in the wake of the Manchester and London Bridge terror attacks in the UK, according to a new research.
The research, by University of Sheffield, covered 840,000 tweets and suggests that the amount of abuse in the run-up to the snap elections in the UK was heavily influenced by news events with abusive tweets to MPs soaring in the wake of the two terrorist attacks. It also found that women candidates were more likely to receive gendered abusive words like “witch”.
Opposition labour leader Jeremy Corbyn received the highest amount of abusive messages on Twitter during the campaign. The overwhelming majority of insulting tweets is targeted at a relatively small number of prominent politicians.
When the findings were broken down by party and gender, male Conservative candidates were the group receiving the highest percentage of abuse in their Twitter mentions.
The government has announced an inquiry into the abuse, both online and offline, that politicians faced during the general election, following a debate in Westminster in which MPs detailed the abuse they and their staff had faced.
One MP said this was “driving people out of politics altogether”, but others have countered that the debate risks labelling all criticism of politicians as “abusive”. Professor Bontcheva, who led the study, along with colleagues Mark Greenwood, Ian Roberts and Dominic Rout, all research associates at the University of Sheffield’s Department of Computer Science, worked with BuzzFeed News to analyse tweets sent to politicians by a sample of politically engaged users.
These users were identified by their use of politically related hashtags in their previous tweets during the final month of the general election campaign.
The politicians included candidates standing for major parties who have a known Twitter profile plus a small number of other prominent politicians who were not standing as candidates.