According to a recent study, and despite popular sentiment that the internet is not safe for women, men may be ones who receives the most abuse on social media. According to think tank Demos, male public figures are several times more likely than female public figures to receive abuse on Twitter.
The think tank analyzed over 2 million tweets over a two-week period. The sample of public figures included celebrities, politicians, journalists and musicians. An equal number was chosen for males and females.
Despite recent claims that the internet is misogynist and is particularly unsafe for women, the think tank found that men were more often abused than women, at least on Twitter.
Over 2.5 percent of tweets directed at the males–tweets containing the @username–contained abuse. Less than 1 percent of the tweets directed at the females was abusive.
That is, over 1 in 20 tweets sent to the males included abuse. Only 1 in 70 tweets directed at the females included abuse.
There was one category, however, where female celebrities received more abuse than men: journalism. Females in this line of work recieved abuse around 3 times as often as men.
Males were found to also be the most common abusers. Men were behind 75 percent of abusive tweets toward other men, and were behind over 60 percent of abusive tweets directed toward women.
There may be more to the issue than can be understood based on these figures alone, however.
According to a recent Harvard study, men have 15 percent more followers than women, men are almost twice as likely to follow another man than a woman, women are 25 percent more likely to follow men than women, and the average man is 40 percent more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman.
The Harvard team concluded that, although there are more women on Twitter, and unlike most other social networks, men dominate the action on Twitter.
By Eliana Ramos