Twitter rape threats and the discourse of online misogyny

In July 2013, after Caroline Criado-Perez successfully campaigned to have a woman appear on an English banknote, she was inundated with misogynistic abuse on Twitter involving graphic, sadistic, and repeated threats of rape and murder. When MP Stella Creasy defended Criado-Perez, she received similar abuse, and in the following days this escalated into bomb threats sent to several public figures such as academic Mary Beard and celebrity Coleen Nolan.

There is a remarkable lack of research into such behaviour making an evidence based approach to it problematic for investigative bodies, parliamentarians, and academics. Despite this, policymakers and legislators are under intense pressure to make quick, long-term decisions on relevant policy and procedure. Indeed, the Department for Culture, Media & Sport Committee (DCMS) Select Committee has already announced an autumn inquiry into harmful online content.

With the above in mind this project will provide urgently-needed insight into those who send extreme online misogynistic threats. Specifically, we will investigate what their language reveals about (1) their concerns, interests, and ideologies; what concept do they seem to have of themselves and their role in society? (2) their motivations and goals; what seems to trigger them? What do they seem to be seeking? and (3) the links between them and other individuals, topics, and behaviours; do they only produce misogynistic threats or do they engage in other hate-speech? Do they act alone or within networks?

To tackle such questions we will start by exploring a seed corpus of nearly 300 such tweets, already given to the project by Criado-Perez and Creasy, for links to related accounts, tweets, topics, and so forth. This content will be downloaded into a large, rich, finely-structured, multi-layered corpus of abuse containing content and accounts that clearly link back to the original abusive tweets. Whilst it would be possible to analyse the seed corpus alone, corpus-based methods harness computing power to enable the rapid, reliable analyses of massive linguistic datasets. Using this approach allows us to undertake a more general analysis of misogynistic hate-speech (i.e. as directed at non-high-profile figures) rather than simply focus purely upon the high-profile cases currently driving debate in this area. By doing this, we open up the possibility of revealing large-scale trends that would be hidden, if not entirely absent, from small datasets like the seed corpus.

This project aims to advance research into misogynistic online threats in a sufficiently timely manner to engage with public concern, inform policy (e.g. the DCMS inquiry), and advise legislators. Our first task then will be to explore the questions: (1) "What can we learn about the rape threat trolls?" and (2) "Why do they make rape threats?" Since we anticipate that these will be of greatest immediate value to our non-academic research users, we plan on largely completing them in the first third of the project's timespan. We will then expand the project to answer objective (3) "What else do rape threat trolls do?" with a view to identifying whether they also engage in more general online hate-speech. Throughout this project, we will also address two methodological objectives: (4) "What is the most appropriate structure for our corpus?" and (5) "What are the most appropriate methods (from the suite of corpus-based methods) for interrogating our corpus?"

In summary, this project will be relevant to several social sciences including sociology, criminology, politics, psychology, and law. It also offers timely insight in an area where policy, practice, and legislation is currently under intense scrutiny and requires such research to help shape future developments. As such, the results will likely be of interest to legislators, policymakers, investigative bodies, and law enforcement agencies, as well as the study participants, media, and general public.

This project should benefit a wide range of academics and non-academics.

We have worked with two MPs and the Ministry of Justice lead on hate crime, Superintendent Paul Gianassi, in putting together this proposal (see Objectives in the Case for Support). We have also spoken with, and gathered data from, victims of online misogyny. These people are are very immediate potential beneficiaries of this research. However, through them we intend to reach out to a wider range of non-academic consumers of research. These will principally be in the areas of policy making and law enforcement. In general the project will produce research of relevance to a pressing contemporary issue that should be of interest to a range of organizations in the public and private sectors.

We would also argue that the corpus approach taken on this project provides, in itself, a substantial benefit for such users of social science research: the findings that emerge from the work of the project and our work with the our principal non-academic research user, Superintendent Paul Gianassi (see Pathways to Impact for more details), will represent a substantial advance on the results that users have had access to heretofore.

The public should also benefit from the outputs of this Centre in at least two ways: i) this project clearly touches on issues in which there is substantial public interest - we will respond to that public interest by ensuring that there is a timely communication of research findings to the general public; ii) the consumption of our research findings by policy makers in particular holds out the prospect of these findings having a beneficial impact on public policy, hence indirectly impacting upon the public.

The academics that will benefit from the Centre come not only from linguistics, but from a range of subjects in the social sciences, most notably Criminology. For researchers in Criminology in particular, we would hope to change their research practices by demonstrating the advantages of combining the corpus approach with other approaches to the analysis of language.

Ensuring that the project has the impact it promises is of vital importance to this proposal. In consequence we have worked both with a key researcher on hate speech in Criminology and with potential non-academic research users in designing this project to ensure that the project proposed here would be of genuine use to them. Similarly, we have made sure that the project itself contains a broad range of researchers and has, from its inception, access to a range of research consumers. By designing the project in consultation with those who should benefit from it, and by working throughout the life of the project with those who can gain from our work, we believe that we have ensured that the promise of this project can be realised for the good of the academic community, the private sector, the public sector and the general public.