Politicians receive abuse on Twitter
The amount of abuse Politicians have been subject to has been revealed by Twitter.
Around 3,000 aggressive tweets are directed towards UK members of parliament every single day. An investigation was led by the BBC to investigate the true extent of online abuse that politicians face online. Out of three million tweets that were directed towards MPs over a six-week period they found more than 130,000, with one in 20 being classified as abusive.
20 MPs that received the highest number of toxic comments weren’t members of the cabinet or shadow cabinet.
The Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley Ms Phillips acknowledged ‘robust criticism was part of their job, but she said a line had been crossed when it came to the language being used. The language was described to be sexist, racist, and over sexualised. Phillips carried on saying that “Sadly, women politicians suffer huge amounts of thinly-veiled or completely direct rape and sexual violence threats- when it becomes not about a subject but about the way you look and about your children and family that’s when it crosses the line.”
Phillips said that she was aware of which colleagues had voted against their principles regarding several matters such as Brexit and military intervention in Syria to avoid a backlash on social media. In a grand scale investigation, the BBC shared data via Perspective which is a tool that uses artificial intelligence to spot toxic and harmful comments online. The team had investigated all tweets mentioning MPs from March to Mid-April.
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson had received the largest number of tweets that were considered harmful, which was 19,000. Other MPs that also were subject to hateful tweets include former culture secretary Nadine Dorries (9,000), Rishi Sunak (9,000) and Labour Leader Sir Keir Starmer (8,000).
Despite these statistics the MPs who received the highest proportion of toxic tweets were backbenchers at the time, amongst the MPs was Mansfield’s conservative MP Ben Bradley.
Bradley was mentioned in several toxic and hateful tweets after he argued for the privatisation of Channel 4.
As well as MP Ben Bradley being subject to abuse, financial secretary James Murray received more that 300 hateful tweets in one day after he spoke about transgender rights in a radio interview.
Conservative MP for Meon Valley Flick Drummond quit twitter subsequently after enduring “out of hand” abuse in 2021. She stated that she came off the platform for her own mental health as the trolls would harass and torment her endlessly. She stated “You don’t know who they are. It’s just vile, and I have to say my mental health is much improved since I’ve come off it.” Regarding how she felt towards social media she said that social media was becoming “democratically dangerous” in regard to how it supports and normalises misogyny. Drummond continues to say, “The public should be able to criticise their MPs and MPs should be accountable, that’s critical to a democracy.’
Recently as of last month the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, finalised his $44bn takeover of twitter but announced that he would have no plans to change its moderation policies for the time being. Demos and Phillips together both deem it as important and dire to regulate Twitter more to stop hate from being spread. The BBC contacted Twitter for a response but was not successful in getting a response.
Written By: Mary England
