Reclaim the Internet research reveals huge scale of social media misogyny

[malaise]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/25/yvette-cooper-leads-cross-party-campaign-against-online-abuse
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Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians will come together to call for a national campaign to defeat online misogyny as research reveals the scale of abuse aimed at women on social media.

Yvette Cooper is joining forces with former Tory minister Maria Miller, former Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson and Labour’s Jess Phillips to launch an online public consultation in an attempt to create a national conversation about tackling the growing scale of online abuse.

To coincide with the launch, the campaign has released research by Demos revealing the huge scale of social media misogyny. The study monitored the use of the words “slut” and “whore” by UK Twitter users over three weeks from the end of April. It found that 6,500 individuals were targeted by 10,000 aggressive and misogynistic tweets in that period.

Internationally, more than 200,000 aggressive tweets using the same words were sent to 80,000 people in the same period – and according to the study, more than half of the offenders were women.

The Reclaim the Internet consultation will be launched on Thursday via the online forum Discourse.org. She is calling for contributions from individuals, organisations, employers, union members, victims, police and tech companies.

The campaign comes after research for the Guardian’s project – the web we want – revealed that of the 10 most abused writers online, eight were women and the other two were black men.