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

Abstract

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.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Cumulative distributions of abuse by individual public figure. One column per domain, one row per gender. Proportion of the required top $N\%$ of public figures to reach 50% of all abuse is annotated.
• Figure 2: Weekly average and overall proportions of public figures receiving at least one abusive tweet. Shows standard deviation, and overall proportion of public figures who received at least one abusive tweet during all data collection.
• Figure 3: Cumulative distributions of abuse by day. One column per domain, one row per gender. Proportion of the required top $N\%$ of days to reach 50% of all abuse is annotated.
• Figure 4: Percentages of public figures who received $>=\frac{1}{3}$ of their total abuse in one day. Only includes public figures who received at least 10 abusive tweets during data collection.
• Figure 5: Histograms of percentages of public figures receiving at least one abusive tweet in a week.