Why was there so much online abuse on election night in New Zealand?
At Areto Labs, we’ve been developing products to make digital communities more positive and inclusive.
Bullying, harassment and abuse in digital communities is a major problem, on social media, and even inside workplace chat rooms and collaboration platforms. Doing everything we can to solve this problem is just the right thing to do. It also results in greater inclusion and belonging for more people in these communities, which means that more people get their important voices and ideas heard, more value is created, and more risk is avoided.
One specific area we’ve explored is toxicity, abuse and harassment towards women in politics on Twitter. To that end, we’ve developed our ParityBOT suite of products, which includes @ParityBOT_CA (deployed in two elections in Canada in 2019), @ParityBOT_NZ (deployed during the 2020 federal election in New Zealand) and @ParityBOT_US (deployed during the 2020 federal election in America).
So far, we’ve seen a hugely positive reaction to our efforts to move culture towards more positivity and inclusion. We’ve also collected some vast datasets that have shown some fascinating results. We’ll explore those results here over the coming weeks.
The data we collected through our @ParityBOT_NZ product showed a 10x increase in toxic tweets during election night in New Zealand. We were surprised to find such a large increase, and decided to dig into the data to find out more.
Here’s what we found:
The total number of toxic tweets we found in the 48 hour period starting the evening election day and ending two days later was 1296. In any other time range like this over the course of the campaign, this number would have been around 100 on average. This represents more than a 10X increase.
About 100 of those that were likely a direct result of a congratulations message from the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, to Jacinda Ardern. Of those 100, about 10% included an insult that was directed at both of them, but about 90% included an insult that was clearly directed at Prime Minister Trudeau and not Prime Minister Ardern.
Ditto the above but for U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson. About the same percentage contained insults towards both, out of about 400 tweets posted likely as a result of a congratulations message from Prime Minister Johnson.
Many of these tweets, as usual, mention the most high profile women politicians (Jacinda Ardern, Judith Collins, Chloe Swarbrick). It’s a mixed bag for whether the comments directed towards them would truly be clear insults, or whether they’re just supportive messages that contain swear words, which would trigger a false positive from the bot.
Some conclusions:
Election night is unusual largely due to international attention
The high volume of tweets is reflective of both the usual rudeness towards women candidates, plus rudeness towards other world leaders, likely from their constituents (not proud of some of my fellow Canadians after reading some of that stuff!), plus some general back and forth in the ‘mosh pit’ of election night Twitter, where women candidates got caught in the crossfire and ongoing threads and conversations
In general, there’s a big mixed bag of stuff in the data
Overall, @ParityBOT_NZ probably tweeted too much: it posted not just when women candidates were directly and truly attacked, but also when men leaders from other countries got involved, when the AI scored something as negative that was actually positive, and when things were just overall a bit messy and unclear. Our general response to this has been, language is the most difficult thing to automate, in many ways. That’s why we’ve designed our system so the only consequence when the bot “gets it wrong” is more positivity shared in the world.
Some clear examples of hate towards women candidates were caught. When we filtered for Jacinda Ardern and Chloe Swarbrick’s Twitter handles, many of these were hateful:
@SenatorWong @jacindaardern @nzlabour two idiots together
@jz3691 @jacindaardern He did you stupid twat.
fuck you @JacindaArdern
@Curiousloo @Keir_Starmer @jacindaardern @nzlabour Like i give a fuck what you think,
@RainbowGreensNZ @NZGreens @janlogie @_chloeswarbrick @EKerekere @RMarchNZ You still suck.
@_chloeswarbrick @NZGreens fuck me another illogical activist speaking against moral law & science, New Zealand is fucked 🤦
@Tommy_MK @_chloeswarbrick Literally shut the fuck up
But many of them were “false positives” and are actually positive:
.@jacindaardern just kicked ass and took names. We need a woman President in the US.
@_chloeswarbrick you absolute legend. Fuck so much congrats!! #GoGreen! #nzpol https://t.co/PtV33sSdHt
Fuck yeah @_chloeswarbrick https://t.co/ADHbaQ6Ahz
You fucking legend @_chloeswarbrick
@_chloeswarbrick @AndreAlessi @NZGreens @JudithCollinsMP YOURE THE SHIT
Congratulations @_chloeswarbrick ! You fucking legend.
@_chloeswarbrick biggest w on the night fuck yes
@KiriAllan @_chloeswarbrick so fucking excited!!!!!!
Fuuuuuuuck yessssss @_chloeswarbrick 🤩🤩🤩💚💚💚
Fuck yeah @_chloeswarbrick
I’m ready to get shit faced celebrating @jacindaardern and @nzlabour ‘s massive win 💃🏻 #NZElection2020
And some, due to the large number of mentions included, are unclear:
@trlawlor @Jackiew80333500 @Keir_Starmer @jacindaardern @nzlabour You sound like a rather pathetic form of malignant cancer x
@trlawlor @RacistLabour @Jackiew80333500 @Keir_Starmer @jacindaardern @nzlabour Must be all that following dicks!
And then there’s potentially a coordinated swarm of sorts, which we are definitely seeing in the US election:
@OldNewZealand @radionz @_chloeswarbrick Stupid little lesbian Nz is fucked The Greens are Hypocrite trough-suckers
@FluffyisElite @radionz @_chloeswarbrick Nz is fucked The Greens are Hypocrite trough-suckers
@peterjogriffin @radionz @_chloeswarbrick Nz is fucked The Greens are Hypocrite trough-suckers
@BrianBoruNZ @radionz @FranHernaNZ @Dunedin_Greens @_chloeswarbrick Nz is fucked The Greens are Hypocrite trough-suckers
@azahirr @radionz @_chloeswarbrick Nz is fucked The Greens are Hypocrite trough-suckers
@DanielHenson6 @radionz @_chloeswarbrick Nz is fucked The Greens are Hypocrite trough-suckers
We’re seeing some similarities and differences in the U.S. as well. Stay tuned and watch for our post on the U.S. election data in the coming weeks!
