The cost of visibility: Gendered online hostility against French MPs

Gendered online violence against elected officials has risen on the research agenda. Various disciplines have explored how online harassment, online abuse and hate speech exist on a spectrum of violence that serves to complicate, even exclude, women’s political participation in democracies (Sobieraj, 2020; Ward & McLoughlin, 2020; Håkansson, 2023). However, especially as many existing studies are limited in data quantity, we still lack evidence on the expressions of gendered online violence – and crucially, it consequences. This paper aims to situate gendered hostility (ranging from hate speech to criticism) in the context of MP’s lived experiences online, focused on the case of France and grounded in the question: what is the gendered impact of online hostility on MPs’ work? Combining computational and qualitative methods, this paper proposes an analysis not only of the scope of different types of gendered online hostility, but also how MPs deal with its consequences. I propose a framework to differentiate between personal abuse on one hand and political criticism on the other, two dynamics that often go hand-in-hand, but are experienced differently by the targeted person. To this effect, I trained a state of the art automatic classifier to recognize these categories and applied it to the total number of mentions, retweets and replies targeting French MPs in the period October 2022-April 2023 (approx. 30 million tweets). The Twitter data was complemented by over 40 interviews with MPs and their staff. Initial results confirm existing findings – while there is no significant difference between women and men in terms of the volume of abusive or critical tweets, women MPs receive highly gendered abuse, evoking stereotypes and sexualized threats. Higher volumes of abuse and criticism follow higher levels of online visibility. Particularly among higher profile women MPs, the labor undertaken to manage and moderate online hostility is burdensome, and sometimes influences the extent to which these MPs choose to engage with both traditional and social media. The paper further explores how MPs choose to express themselves online after being targeted by hostility, contributing to the discussion of women’s political participation in the online age.