Journalists are most likely to receive abuse: Analysing online abuse of UK public figures across sport, politics, and journalism on Twitter

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Burke-Moore, Liam, Williams, Angus R., Bright, Jonathan
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Burke-Moore, Liam
Williams, Angus R.
Bright, Jonathan
author_facet Burke-Moore, Liam
Williams, Angus R.
Bright, Jonathan
contents Engaging with online social media platforms is an important part of life as a public figure in modern society, enabling connection with broad audiences and providing a platform for spreading ideas. However, public figures are often disproportionate recipients of hate and abuse on these platforms, degrading public discourse. While significant research on abuse received by groups such as politicians and journalists exists, little has been done to understand the differences in the dynamics of abuse across different groups of public figures, systematically and at scale. To address this, we present analysis of a novel dataset of 45.5M tweets targeted at 4,602 UK public figures across 3 domains (members of parliament, footballers, journalists), labelled using fine-tuned transformer-based language models. We find that MPs receive more abuse in absolute terms, but that journalists are most likely to receive abuse after controlling for other factors. We show that abuse is unevenly distributed in all groups, with a small number of individuals receiving the majority of abuse, and that for some groups, abuse is more temporally uneven, being driven by specific events, particularly for footballers. We also find that a more prominent online presence and being male are indicative of higher levels of abuse across all 3 domains.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_03376
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Journalists are most likely to receive abuse: Analysing online abuse of UK public figures across sport, politics, and journalism on Twitter
Burke-Moore, Liam
Williams, Angus R.
Bright, Jonathan
Computers and Society
Engaging with online social media platforms is an important part of life as a public figure in modern society, enabling connection with broad audiences and providing a platform for spreading ideas. However, public figures are often disproportionate recipients of hate and abuse on these platforms, degrading public discourse. While significant research on abuse received by groups such as politicians and journalists exists, little has been done to understand the differences in the dynamics of abuse across different groups of public figures, systematically and at scale. To address this, we present analysis of a novel dataset of 45.5M tweets targeted at 4,602 UK public figures across 3 domains (members of parliament, footballers, journalists), labelled using fine-tuned transformer-based language models. We find that MPs receive more abuse in absolute terms, but that journalists are most likely to receive abuse after controlling for other factors. We show that abuse is unevenly distributed in all groups, with a small number of individuals receiving the majority of abuse, and that for some groups, abuse is more temporally uneven, being driven by specific events, particularly for footballers. We also find that a more prominent online presence and being male are indicative of higher levels of abuse across all 3 domains.
title Journalists are most likely to receive abuse: Analysing online abuse of UK public figures across sport, politics, and journalism on Twitter
topic Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.03376