In a recent report released by Amnesty International, female Twitter users are faced with an increased amount of abuse, with women of color, particularly Black women, being frequently targeted, writes Wired.
The nonprofit organization, which focuses on human rights, had reportedly asked for Twitter to release “meaningful information about reports of violence and abuse against women, as well as other groups, on the platform, and how they respond to it,” but was shot down by the company.
Amnesty International’s report found that 7.1 percent of tweets sent to 778 female journalists and politicians in the U.S. and the U.K in 2017 were abusive, per Wired. Women of color were 34 percent more likely to be harassed than White women; Black women received the brunt of the targeted language, with one in every 10 tweets sent to them were viewed as abusive.
“We found that, although abuse is targeted at women across the political spectrum, women of color were much more likely to be impacted and black women are disproportionately targeted. Twitter’s failure to crack down on this problem means it is contributing to the silencing of already marginalized voices,” a senior adviser for tactical research at Amnesty International, Milena Marin, said in a statement to Wired.
The organization relied on a team of over 6,500 volunteers to look at 288,000 tweets between January and December of 2017.
Amnesty International views problematic tweets as messages that contain “hurtful or hostile content” and members looked at messages aimed a the 778 women that contained threats.
“We have the data to back up what women have long been telling us—that Twitter is a place where racism, misogyny, and homophobia are allowed to flourish basically unchecked,” said Marin.
