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ABSTRACT
There has been growing public attention around the abuse of MPs online including criminal convictions for violent threats, regular coverage of racist and misogynistic language directed at representatives. Yet, the extent of the problem and patterns of abuse remain relatively under-researched. So far, much of coverage of the problem is anecdotal or based on self-reporting from MPs. This research sets out to provide a more rigorous benchmark measure of abuse. It also examines targets and triggers for social media abuse – how far is abuse connected to contentious debates such as Brexit or targeted at specific groups of MPs (e.g. female representatives)? Our results indicate that whilst the overall volume of abuse appears low, social media abuse has become ubiquitous and is highly public. Furthermore, whilst some abuse is undoubtedly targeted and gendered, the biggest proportion of abuse follows a reactive response to political discussions and public interventions of MPs.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
Dr Stephen Ward is a Reader in Politics at the University of Salford. His research interests centre on the use of the internet and social media by political organisations notably around political campaigning, participation and mobilisation.
Dr Liam McLoughlin is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Salford and has recently completed his PhD on political representation and social media in the United Kingdom. His research interests centre on citizen-elite communication, representation, and campaigns.
Notes
1 A subsequent study of social media abuse directed at candidates, (rather than MPs), in 2017 UK election was conducted by a research team at University Sheffield in collaboration with Buzzfeed. The results of the study were similar in terms of overall levels of abuse and gendered nature of abuse (Buzzfeed, Citation2017).
2 This sub section is based largely on unpublished doctoral research (McLoughlin Citation2019). This includes interviews with around 20 Westminster MPs along with quantative data on the use of social media by UK MPs.
3 As this paper was being finalised, Luciana Berger MP left the Labour Party after suffering from sustained anti-semitic abuse particular via social media including Labour Party members.
4 The time period covered both times when parliament was sitting and Christmas recess period to see whether abuse related specifically to parliamentary agenda. We also wanted a sufficiently long time period to provide coverage of variety of issues on the agenda and also weekly routines of parliamentary business such as PMQs.
5 TAGS (or Twitter Archive Google Sheets) and is available at https://tags.hawksey.info/.
6 This coding was undertaken by one of the researchers, therefore an intercoder reliability test was unfeasible.
7 For ethical reasons, this paper does not disclose the full text of these tweets, so they cannot be traced back to their author.
8 Andrew Percy, Victoria Atkins, David Warburton and Philip Davies (all Conservative) have all reported leaving Twitter due to abuse. Several MPs such as Annelise Dodds (Labour) (personal interview, January 29, 2018) have suggested that abuse makes them wary of what they post for fear of abuse. See also Atlanata (Citation2018) chapter 3 for discussion of the ‘chilling effect’ of abuse on female politicians and political activists.
9 See, for example, Liz Saville Roberts MP (Plaid Cymru) when discussing online abuse of woman MPs has argued that Twitter instead of going after perpetrators of abuse tells women how to hide and expect them to ‘regulate their behavior’ (Westminster Foundation For Democracy, Citation2018, p. 14).
10 Given the seemingly instantaneous nature and anger of much MP abuse it is interesting to note Instagram’s recent initiative of letting users know the first time they start sending abuse or asking users if they are sure they want to press send on an abusive message (Huffpost, Citation2019). Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/instagram_uk_5d244114e4b0cfb595fb2cdf.
11 See examples of Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth MPs who have suggested that significant levels of ant-semitic abuse they have received has come members of their own parties (Mason, Citation2016).