Women politicians face more personal attacks online. Who is to blame?

Giulia Fossati entered Italian politics around 2021, turning regularly to social media to share her views on topics like migration, racism, and feminism. But her online presence came at a cost.

“There is great violence on social media,” said Fossati, a member of the centre-left Partito Democratico who represents women who are registered party members in Pavia, near Milan.

“I get many comments, especially when I talk about feminist topics,” she told Euronews Next, citing examples like “go to the kitchen,” or “idiot shut up”.

Fossati is not yet a household name in Italian politics, yet she is already facing online harassment, with insults often combining digs at her gender and age.

“They call me a ‘young woman’ in a way that makes me sound less credible, less defensible than an adult,” she said.

Fossati’s experience is not an exception. 

Women politicians are more likely than their male counterparts to face identity-based attacks on social media, according to a new peer-reviewed study published in the journal Politics and Gender.

Researchers analysed more than 23 million posts on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, that were addressed to politicians in Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. At the time, the platform still had active content moderation.

While men and women face a similar number of online attacks, male politicians tend to be targeted with general insults and female politicians are more often attacked for their appearance, gender, ethnicity, or personal morality, the study found.

In Europe, fame has little to do with the attacks. Female politicians face uncivil tweets regardless of how well-known they are, and they are more exposed to such attacks than their male counterparts, the researchers found.

The study defined “uncivil” tweets as those containing hate speech, gender stereotypes, exclusionary language (like “women should stay at home rather than do politics”), threats to individual rights, name-calling, character attacks (“liar,” “traitor”), vulgarity, sarcasm, all-caps shouting, or content that is incendiary or humiliating.

These online attacks, researchers warned, can lead women to reduce their presence online and deter them from running for political office.

The deep-rooted causes of online hate towards women

The study has some limitations. Andrea Pető, a professor in the department of gender studies at the Central European University in Vienna, criticised the study’s use of AI, saying that while these models can flag explicit threats, they struggle to detect more subtle forms of verbal aggression.

“Artificial intelligence cannot catch the nuances,” Pető told Euronews Next.

Likewise, by flagging comments as “uncivil,” some context may be missed, for example, the fact that many “democratic voters hold these supposedly ‘uncivil’ viewpoints,” she said.

Even so, the study’s overall conclusions came as no surprise to gender and politics experts. Online harassment of women has long been under scrutiny, prompting research, debate, and legal reform.

Power, politics, and public debate have not historically been associated with female roles or traditions. Consider women’s right to vote. In some European countries, such as Greece, universal suffrage for national elections was established only in 1952.

The legacy of this gender inequality is evident even today. When women enter political spaces, including on social media, they may encounter hostility and attacks because they are women, Pető said.

“Women are expected to be in the private sphere and those questioning this divide, let they be witches, or Marie Curie or local politicians, or an MP, face a certain kind of disciplining action from the public sphere, run by men,” she said.

But is this online hostility driven by deep-rooted societal attitudes, by the technological systems that amplify them, or both?

Technological and economic issues

“Technology often works as a mirror,” said Sandra Wachter, professor of technology and regulation at the University of Oxford and at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany.

“Those who already experience oppression and discrimination in society face it on a larger scale if we implement technology in a completely unfettered way. And this is why law is important,” she told Euronews Next.

Wachter noted that, beyond social and historical causes, online attacks against women are also driven by the economic interests of major tech companies.

She said their business models are designed to keep users online as long as possible to sell advertisements.

“What people want to see and what keeps them engaged is something that is raging, outrageous,” Wachter said.

That’s a key reason why fake news, often characterised with a sensational tone, tends to diffuse farther and faster than legitimate information.

Even so, many people are unaware of the problem, Wachter said. Victims of online attacks are often blamed, while perpetrators – and even law enforcement – frequently fail to grasp how serious the consequences can be, partly due to the digital setting, she said.

How to fix the problem

Some platforms, such as TikTok, use AI-driven content moderation, while others, such as Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, have scaled back content reviews.

But AI cannot catch everything, warned Sara de Vuyst, a professor in contemporary visual culture at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands.

“This [the use of AI] has some issues; they’re missing things when the comments are formulated in a more sarcastic way, nuances get lost,” de Vuyst told Euronews Next.

Both de Vuyst and Wachter agree that regulations like the European Union’s Digital Service Act (DSA) are a step in the right direction.

Entered into force in February 2024, the DSA aims to protect consumers’ rights online. It makes it easier for users to flag if an online post is problematic, and requires big social media companies to implement risk-reduction protocols.

Yet both de Vuyst and Wachter argue that under the DSA, corporate accountability of these companies remains low.

“Those are all great, fantastic steps in the right direction,” Wachter said. “But the thing that nobody has yet done is ask the question: ‘what about the business model?’”

Back in Italy, Fossati has taken matters into her own hands.

At first, she spent time engaging in discussions with her online haters, trying to understand their perspectives. However, she adopted a different approach after realising that many commenters were not open to genuine debate.

“If someone insults me, my answer is always a very ironic one,” she said.

If a comment is particularly offensive, she reminds the user that she could press charges, yet she has never done so because it would be an expensive and cumbersome process.

Despite the attacks, Fossati keeps up her motivation and chooses to focus on the bright side.

“There are often negative comments because we don’t write about how good people are,” she said. Online haters “don’t represent the whole reality”.