Twitter is a toxic place for women.
That’s according to a new report by Amnesty International and Element AI, which analyzed millions of tweets showing women are targeted with hate speech on social platforms.
The Troll Patrol Report found that 7.1 percent of tweets sent to women can be considered “problematic” or “abusive.” That’s one every 30 seconds on average or a total of 1.1 million.
“We have built the world’s largest crowdsourced dataset about online abuse against women,” Milena Marin, Senior Adviser for Tactical Research at Amnesty International, said in a statement. “We have the data to back up what women have long been telling us—that Twitter is a place where racism, misogyny, and homophobia are allowed to flourish basically unchecked.”
Black women are particularly impacted and are 84 percent more likely to be targeted with hate speech online than their white counterparts. Women of color are 34 percent more likely to be targeted in tweets with abusive language.
The report surveyed millions of tweets received by 778 journalists and politicians from the UK and US last year across the political spectrum.
“We found that, although abuse is targeted at women across the political spectrum, women of color were much more likely to be impacted and black women are disproportionately targeted,” said Marin. “Twitter’s failure to crack down on this problem means it is contributing to the silencing of already marginalized voices.”
The human rights group has repeatedly asked Twitter to release data detailing the abuse taking place on their platform and address the hate speech. While Twitter has yet to release a comprehensive breakdown of violence against women on their platform, the social media company did release its latest transparency report last week.
