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When there is no other argument, gender is the only argument. Every woman at least once in her lifetime has heard the phrase ‘behave like a woman’ and lately, it seems like Twitter has also caught on to this expression.
Arguably the most liberated platform for everyone belonging to any caste, religion, beliefs, sexual orientation or gender identity to express and share their views, Twitter has now turned into a battleground for Indian female politicians.
According to the Troll Patrol India report by the Amnesty International India released on January 23, 2020, everyday women, on Twitter face a tonne of abuse, ranging from racist and sexist attacks to rape and death threats. They measured the scale and nature of online abuse faced by women politicians in India during the 2019 General Elections.
For this, they chose a sample size of 95 women politicians and read their tweets between March-May 2019, a short period of time leading up to the elections. Out of all the tweets mentioning the politicians, few tweets were chosen as the sample for the study and these tweets were analysed multiple times by a number of people.
The results:
I. 13.8% of the tweets mentioning the women politicians were problematic or abusive; higher than the UK and USA.
II. The more active the politician was on Twitter, the more she got abused.
III. One in every five of these problematic tweets was sexist or misogynistic.
IV. If a politician was Muslim or perceived as one, the abuse rate increased by 55.5%, with tweets containing ethnic and religious slurs.
V. Women from marginalised castes received 59% more caste-based abuse than other women politicians.
VI. Women politicians from political parties other than the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the ruling party before the 2019 elections, faced more abuse online.
The report asserted that online abuse has the power to belittle, demean, intimidate, and eventually silence women. Amnesty International also asked Twitter to address this issue in order to eradicate the silencing effect that online violence has brought on to women’s right to expression and freedom.
Feature image courtesy of (L) Amnesty International & (R) The Hindu
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