The Role of Gender in Hate Speech Targeting Politicians: Evidence from Finnish Twitter

What is it about?

This study uses a manually classified tweet sample for examining hate speech targeting the ministers of the government of Finland. We use logistic regressions to investigate the distribution of hate speech by gender, age, party leadership, visibility, and political party, with a special focus on gender. Additionally, we divide minister portfolios into masculine, neutral, and feminine positions and examine whether a minister’s gender affects the likelihood of being targeted. Our results suggest that male and female ministers are equally likely, on average, to be targeted by hate speech. However, this relation is nuanced. First, for male ministers, visibility increases the frequency of hate speech. For female ministers, the result is the opposite. Moreover, the results suggest that women in masculine positions are more likely to face hate speech. In addition, men are targeted by hate speech less when they are holding a masculine minister portfolio. This suggests that gender roles affect hate speech.

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Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Differently from many other studies, I manually classified the tweets into hateful and non-hateful tweets. This improves the precision of the classification for several reasons. Using this sample, I show that hate speech targeting Finnish ministers is common. Furthermore, even if the likelihood to be targeted by hate speech is equal between men and women, there are large differences between the ministers. Moreover, regression analysis reveals a number of results.

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