Online abuse of MPS doubled between 2015 and 2017
ONLINE abuse of MPS has soared by more than double between the General Election in 2015 and last year’s poll, analysis of more than a million tweets shows.
Twitter insults aimed at politicians rose from about 10,000 during the poll of three years ago to just under 25,000 during last year’s snap election, although the number of total tweets also rose in the same period.
According to project leader Professor Kalina Bontcheva from the University of Sheffield, the abuse seemed unaffected by party or gender.
“The increase in abuse towards public figures is a shocking development and one that the UK Government is right to take seriously.
“If people are dissuaded from standing for election, then our representation on a democratic level is under threat,” she explained.
Labour’s Stephen Doughty claimed Twitter was not doing enough to tackle online abuse.
He tweeted an example of abuse directed at him alongside Twitter’s response that it did not violate policies. He said: “If you wonder why Facebook, Twitter, etc. are increasingly becoming difficult places, here’s another example of abuse we get and the response of the social media companies, who think we deserve a different threshold of abuse ‘to allow discourse’.”
The study shows for the first time that both the proportion and volume of Twitter abuse increased between 2015 and 2017.
Prominent politicians tended to receive a lot of tweets and also a lot of abuse but lesser-known MPS received proportionally higher levels of abuse.
Boris Johnson’s Twitter timeline was filled with 6.6 per cent of abusive tweets in 2015, rising to 9.3% in 2017 while Diane Abbott, the Shadow Home Secretary, received 2.5% of abuse in 2015, which rose to 3.4% in 2017.
In 2015, users who tweeted abusive replies were more concerned with the economy but by 2017 they were concerned with national security in the wake of terror attacks on UK soil.
Ms Bontcheva added: “Whilst there was a clear increase in abuse on Twitter in 2017 compared to 2015, it was interesting to see the differences in the topics.”