When online harassment doesn’t follow the rules

Preview

Is there a ‘cost’ to online harassment? Is it quantifiable? Beyond the toll it weighs on human victims, the rampant toxicity we see across social networks and communities, does this toxicity affect the bottom line of social networks?

Well, in December 2018, Amnesty International released a robust report on online harassment against women politicians and journalists on Twitter, which seemingly caused a 13% drop in Twitter’s worth two days after it was published. What made Amnesty International’s “Troll Patrol” report so damaging was regardless of political affiliation, women journalists and politicians were targeted by online harassment more than other demographics. And black women were targeted even more-so, being 84% more likely to be mentioned in abusive or problematic tweets than white women.

Let’s break into the report’s background a bit: In April 2018, Milena Marin, the project lead for Amnesty International’s “Troll Patrol” reached out to me to help guide aspects of the data labeling. The project was the largest of its kind with over 600,000 tweets labeled by 6,524 volunteers all across the world.