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ARTICLES
Girls Attacking Girls on Social Media
Real Life Mean Girls
According to researchers from the United Kingdom, around half of the misogynistic remarks made online, specifically on social media, occur between women. This contradicts our typical assumption that men are at fault for most of the harassment.
The study was conducted by Demos, “Britain’s leading cross-party think tank.” In the study, 6,500 Twitter users were found to have been targeted in 10,000 misogynistic tweets, using the terms “whore” and “slut”. Additionally, in the same time frame, 80,000 people received over 200,000 aggressive tweets.
How was this detection possible? Demos built algorithms which identified tweets containing the trigger words as intentionally aggressive towards others, as generic conversation pertaining to misogyny, or as self-identifiers.
A researcher in the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, Alex Krasodomski-Jones, says, “It is clear that just as the digital world has created new opportunities for public debate and social interaction, it has also built new battlegrounds for the worst aspects of human behaviour.”
“… it’s important to note that misogyny is prevalent across all social media…”
What can you do?
In order to help, for starters, it is important that we all think before we speak. It’s something we are told from a young age, but it is a skill to be truly conscious of it. Everyone wants to feel powerful. Everyone wants their potential to be seen. Everyone wants to be loved. Everyone wants to be successful. The only way for this to work is to empower one another and accept people the way they are. Our uniqueness makes us perfect – let’s embrace that.
To finish with a quote from the infamous movie, Mean Girls…
“Calling somebody else fat won’t make you any skinnier…
Calling someone stupid doesn’t make you any smarter…
All you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you.”
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