Conversations about crosswords and cricket were respectful
The Guardian took a look at comments on the Guardian, and found what we all knew.
New research into our own comment threads provides the first quantitative evidence for what female journalists have long suspected: that articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about.
Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.
And the 10 regular writers who got the least abuse? All men.
Imagine my complete lack of surprise.
We also found that some subjects attracted more abusive or disruptive comments than others. Conversations about crosswords, cricket, horse racing and jazz were respectful; discussions about the Israel/Palestine conflict were not. Articles about feminism attracted very high levels of blocked comments. And so did rape.
Again – I could not be less surprised.
Mind you, it used to surprise me that feminism was so very unpopular at the Guardian, but it doesn’t any more.
At its most extreme, online abuse takes the form of threats to kill, rape or maim. Thankfully, such abuse was extremely rare on the Guardian – and when it did appear it was immediately blocked and the commenter banned.
Less extreme “author abuse” – demeaning and insulting speech targeted at the writer of the article or another comment – is much more common on all online news sites, and it formed a significant proportion of the comments that were blocked on the Guardian site, too.
Here are some examples: a female journalist reports on a demonstration outside an abortion clinic, and a reader responds, “You are so ugly that if you got pregnant I would drive you to the abortion clinic myself”; a British Muslim writes about her experiences of Islamophobia and is told to “marry an ISIS fighter and then see how you like that!”; a black correspondent is called “a racist who hates white people” when he reports the news that another black American has been shot by the police.
Familiar to anyone who has spent 15 minutes reading comments online.
“Dismissive trolling” was blocked too – comments such as “Calm down, dear”, which mocked or otherwise dismissed the author or other readers rather than engaged with the piece itself.
Is that kind of thing said to men much? Especially white men? I don’t think so.
Oh calm down, dear.
The Guardian is acting like they just did the first research. Way back in 2006 — and I think that even included Guardian comments, but I may misremember — a research paper totted up the viciousness and the sum came out at 25 times (25 times!) more abuse directed at women.
Plus, when directed at men, the “abuse” was on the order of “You’re two beers short of a sixpack.” When directed at women, it threatened torture and death.
(Commenter S.J. Obsessive is no more! I was trying on a new identity but it just felt deceitful, so I’ve reverted to the ‘nym I’ve used for six years or more. It fits me better:-) )
Anyhoo…….
On the subject of ‘ calm down’, there is a former Arsenal and England footballer, Ian Wright, who used to co-host a show on Talk Sport radio. Wright, a black man, is highly excitable and would go off on rants for the slightest reason. I was listening to the show one afternoon and he was blowing a fuse over something or other. A listener phoned in and told Wright that he needed to ‘calm his skin down a bit’.
As you’d expect, he nearly exploded, shouting down the caller, telling him how racist it was to tell a black man that his skin was the wrong colour and so on. His co-host, a white man, joined in, but all the while the caller was chuckling away until he eventually got a chance to explain that he was also black, and the expression merely referred to the fact that when people went on rants they got a rush of blood to the head, flushing the cheeks, and was just a way of saying ‘calm down, it’s not good for your heart to get so excited’.
I’ve used the expression ever since.
What do they mean, “long suspected”? Women and people of color don’t merely “suspect” that they have been subjected to abuse. They know it because they have lived through it. They know that white, male writers are not subjected to anything like such abuse, because the dominant culture is oblivious to its occurrence. To them, it doesn’t happen; as a consequence, they deny or are in denial that it really does happen to others. Even saying, “as women have long suspected,” rather than “as women have long known,” or “as women have long been saying,” is an example of how the testimony and experience of women and people of color gets ignored, denied, and dismissed. It’s part of the pattern of abuse, in and of itself.
@ maddog1129 #3
The problem is, though, that women don’t know, in that they don’t know whether the amount of abuse they are receiving is the same as the amount directed at men. They might plausibly suspect that they are particular targets for abuse, but they can’t know it, if they don’t know how they compare. The empirical data provided by the sort of research undertaken by The Guardian is exactly what’s needed to go from plausible suspicion to knowledge.
As unsurprising as these findings are, it is nevertheless very useful to have this shit quantified and documented, if only so that we can point to it when some shitbag dismisses complaints as ‘mere anecdote’ rather than data.