Misogynistic Tweets Correlate With Violence Against Women

College student expression on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic

Objective:The current study longitudinally examines college student Twitter patterns throughout initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to better understand psychological impact and online personal communication during the pandemic.

Participants:A dataset consisting of ∼720,000 tweets posted by students from universities throughout the United States during the 2020 spring semester was analyzed according to structural and sentimental analysis.

Methods:Using a data-driven approach, three time periods emerged which reflected the transition to online learning.

Results:Significant changes in structure and sentiment of tweets were observed across phases.

Conclusions:Changes in Twitter patterns revealed important features of this unprecedented transition to online learning for college students.

The Angry Echo Chamber: A Study of Extremist and Emotional Language Changes in Incel Communities Over Time

Involuntary celibates, or incels, are part of a growing online subculture. Incels are men who are unable to engage in a sexual relationship with a woman and who experience significant distress and anger as a result. In recent years, high-profile incidents of violence perpetrated by incels or those who share incel ideology have increased research attention. Incels communicate online and share several characteristics with other online extremist groups. While only a fraction of incels engage in such violence, a broader spectrum of violence should be considered, including online harassment or general violence against women. This study sought to examine how ongoing engagement on an online incel forum affects changes in incel comments in terms of expressed anger and sadness and use of incel violent extremist language. We collected comments made on an incel forum over a 3-month period. We then identified prolific users and included their comments in our analysis. To assess how their language changed, we used a text-processing program (LIWC: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) to assess the extent to which anger, sadness, and incel violent extremist language were expressed in the comments. Our findings indicated that incels express more anger in their comments than users on other platforms such as Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. However, they did not express greater sadness. Further, we found that incels are already quite angry and sad when they join the forum, and they already use a fair amount of incel vocabulary. Initially, these aspects of their language increase, but they flatten over time. This pattern suggests that introduction to and embracing of incel ideology occurs elsewhere on the Internet, and prior to people joining an incel forum. Implications in terms of prevention of online radicalization and future directions are discussed.

Twitter misogyny associated with Hillary Clinton increased throughout the 2016 U.S. election campaign

Online misogyny has become a fixture in female politicians' lives. Backlash theory suggests that it may represent a threat response prompted by female politicians' counterstereotypical, power-seeking behaviors. We investigated this hypothesis by analyzing Twitter references to Hillary Clinton before, during, and after her presidential campaign. We collected a corpus of over 9 million tweets from 2014 to 2018 that referred to Hillary Clinton, and employed an interrupted time series analysis on the relative frequency of misogynistic language within the corpus. Prior to 2015, the level of misogyny associated with Clinton decreased over time, but this trend reversed when she announced her presidential campaign. During the campaign, misogyny steadily increased and only plateaued after the election, when the threat of her electoral success had subsided. These findings are consistent with the notion that online misogyny towards female political nominees is a form of backlash prompted by their ambition for power in the political arena.

Political Bot Bias in the Perception of Online Discourse

Four nationally representative studies ( N = 1,986; three preregistered) find evidence for a bias in how people perceive opposing viewpoints expressed through online discourse. These studies elucidate a political bot bias, where political partisans (vs. their out-party) are more likely to view counter-ideological (vs. ideologically consistent) tweets to be social media bots (vs. humans). Study 1 demonstrates that American Democrats and Republicans are more likely to attribute tweets to bots when those tweets express counter-ideological views. Study 2 demonstrated this bias with actual bot tweets generated by the Russian government and comparable human tweets. Study 3 demonstrated this bias manifests in the context of real recent elections and is associated with markers of political animosity. Study 4 experimentally demonstrates the consequences of bot attribution for perceptions of online political discourse. Our findings document a consistent bias that has implications for political discussion online and political polarization more broadly.

Is the Anthropomorphization of Sex Dolls Associated with Objectification and Hostility Toward Women? A Mixed Method Study among Doll Users

Both the ownership and development of sex dolls and robots are passionately debated, with skeptics suspecting that their increasing human-likeness and the accompanying anthropomorphization (i.e., attributing human-likeness) reinforce the objectification of, and hostility toward, women. As empirical data are largely lacking, we scrutinized this hypothesis in a pre-registered study among doll owners (N = 217), comparing two user groups: "toy group" (n = 104; doll as sex toy) and "partner group" (n = 113; doll as partner). We related their objectification tendencies (i.e., seeing women merely as objects, e.g., to promote sexual desire) as well as their hostility toward women, to the anthropomorphization of their doll. Additionally, we collected qualitative data on how participants perceived their doll usage affected their attitudes toward women. The partner group expressed greater levels of hostility and anthropomorphization, moderate in magnitude. Objectification mediated the influence of anthropomorphization on hostility and a higher percentage described a change in attitudes toward women in response to doll use. These data provide the first empirical evidence that the tendency to anthropomorphize dolls is related to negative attitudes toward women. Given the ongoing development of sex robots designed to surpass dolls in human-likeness and anthropomorphization, this finding seems highly significant.

Is gender-based violence a confluence of culture? Empirical evidence from social media

Gender-based violence (GBV) has been plaguing our society for long back. The severity of GBV has spurred research around understanding the causes and factors leading to GBV. Understanding factors and causes leading to GBV is helpful in planning and executing efficient policies to curb GBV. Past researches have claimed a country's culture to be one of the driving reasons behind GBV. The culture of a country consists of cultural norms, societal rules, gender-based stereotypes, and social taboos which provoke GBV. These claims are supported by theoretical or small-scale survey-based research that suffers from under-representation and biases. With the advent of social media and, more importantly, location-tagged social media, huge ethnographic data are available, creating a platform for many sociological research. In this article, we also utilize huge social media data to verify the claim of confluence between GBV and the culture of a country. We first curate GBV content from different countries by collecting a large amount of data from Twitter. In order to explore the relationship between a country's culture and GBV content, we performed correlation analyses between a country's culture and its GBV content. The correlation results are further re-validated using graph-based methods. Through the findings of this research, we observed that countries with similar cultures also show similarity in GBV content, thus reconfirming the relationship between GBV and culture.

"Spring is the best time to lose weight": Evidence that dieting is seasonal and reaches peak intensity during Spring

Does dieting intensify during Spring? Previous research suggests that body dissatisfaction is seasonal and peaks during Summer. Extending these findings to seasonal dieting, we contend that individuals' apprehensions about heightened Summertime body dissatisfaction motivate Springtime dieting. To detect seasonal dieting, we examined the seasonal frequencies of 69 dieting hashtags within a database of 564 million tweets originating from the United States and spanning eight calendar years (2012-19). In total, we detected 628,355 dieting hashtags. Of these, 30% occurred during Spring, 20% during Autumn/Fall, and 25% during each of Summer and Winter. During Spring, there were ~64,000 additional dieting hashtags compared with Autumn/Fall, and ~32,000 additional hashtags compared with Summer and Winter. Of the nine most common dieting hashtags that together accounted for 96% of the total, all nine peaked during Spring (ps < 0.0001). This Spring-centric pattern was apparent for both appearance-oriented diets (e.g., "atkins" and "weightwatchers") and ostensibly non-appearance-oriented diets (e.g., "vegan" and "glutenfree"), suggesting that non-appearance-oriented diets might nonetheless be co-opted for appearance-oriented purposes. In conclusion, we found credible evidence that dieting intensifies during Spring. Future research should examine whether eating disorders and muscle dysmorphia also intensify during Spring because dieting is intrinsic to both these conditions.

Incel Activity on Social Media Linked to Local Mating Ecology

Young men with few prospects of attracting a mate have historically threatened the internal peace and stability of societies. In some contemporary societies, such involuntary celibate-or incel-men promote much online misogyny and perpetrate real-world violence. We tested the prediction that online incel activity arises via local real-world mating-market forces that affect relationship formation. From a database of 4 billion Twitter posts (2012-2018), we geolocated 321 million tweets to 582 commuting zones in the continental United States, of which 3,649 tweets used words peculiar to incels and 3,745 were about incels. We show that such tweets arise disproportionately within places where mating competition among men is likely to be high because of male-biased sex ratios, few single women, high income inequality, and small gender gaps in income. Our results suggest a role for social media in monitoring and mitigating factors that lead young men toward antisocial behavior in real-world societies.

Public Attention and Sentiment toward Intimate Partner Violence Based on Weibo in China: A Text Mining Approach

The mobile internet has resulted in intimate partner violence (IPV) events not being viewed as interpersonal and private issues. Such events become public events in the social network environment. IPV has become a public health issue of widespread concern. It is a challenge to obtain systematic and detailed data using questionnaires and interviews in traditional Chinese culture, because of face-saving and the victim’s shame factors. However, online comments about specific IPV events on social media provide rich data in understanding the public’s attitudes and emotions towards IPV. By applying text mining and sentiment analysis to the field of IPV, this study involved construction of a Chinese IPV sentiment dictionary and a complete research framework. We analyzed the trends of the Chinese public’s emotional evolution concerning IPV events from the perspectives of a time series as well as geographic space and social media. The results show that the anonymity of social networks and the guiding role of opinion leaders result in traditional cultural factors such as face-saving and family shame for IPV events being no longer applicable, leading to the spiral of an anti-silence effect. Meanwhile, in the process of public emotional communication, anger often overwhelms reason, and the spiral of silence remains in effect in social media. In addition, there are offensive words used in the IPV event texts that indicate misogyny in emotional, sexual, economic and psychological abuse. Fortunately, mainstream media, as crucial opinion leaders in the social network, can have a positive role in guiding public opinion, improving people’s ability to judge the validity of network information, and formulating people’s rational behaviour.