MAGAReport for 7/30/2024 - the misogyny continues

A glimpse at some of my academic research on online harassment and misogyny

One of the things I research is online harassment and last year, I published a paper about misogynistic harassment of women in power and what it means about broader online behavior. Given that the misogyny continues to build on the online MAGA forums I monitor, I though I’d give you a look at what I’ve learned about people who do this kind of harassment.

tl;dr people who use misogynistic slurs toward powerful women do about 3X as much online harassment as controls

On Twitter and Parler, I looked at misogynistic slurs targeted at four women: Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, MTG, & Lauren Boebert. I took people who posted those slurs, gathered all their posts, and compared them to control groups. (note there were no slurs posted at MTG or Boebert on Parler in the dataset I was working with)

The main control group was people who tweeted about those four women generally. Now that could include things like official accounts of government agencies or media outlets that would never use slurs, and that could bias the data. We don’t want to compare harassment from individual people to mainstream organizations. So I also create two more controls that were subgroups who:

• used at least 1 slur in their posts

• used at least 1 misogynistic slur in their posts

The misogynistic slurs were b***c, wh**e, c**t, sl*t, and h*e, modeled after Bot Sentinel's study of tweets harassing Harris (PDF). I counted overall slurs by using this list from the University of Sheffield.

The results: people who posted misogynistic slurs at these women were around 3X more likely to use slurs overall than the main control, and significantly more likely to use slurs than both control sub-groups. This table is slurs / 100 posts:

Interestingly, there was no difference by party – the same pattern held whether you were harassing Harris and Pelosi or MTG and Boebert (on Twitter – no one harassed MTG and Boebert in the Parler dataset)

What this tells us is:

1. misogynistic attacks are a good predictor of generally bad behavior

2. There's something unique about misogyny and power. Even compared to people who use these slurs generally, people who *target them at powerful women* do significantly more harassing.

This is something to keep in mind as you see misogynistic attacks against Harris play out in the next 3 months. Statistically speaking, the people making them are more likely to engage in other denigrating, dehumanizing behavior in a range of contexts.

If you want to go more in depth, the paper is:

Golbeck, Jennifer. "Misogyny, Women in Power, and Patterns of Social Media Harassment." Intl Conf on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, 2023. https://www.cs.umd.edu/~golbeck/Golbeck-harassment.pdf