By Editors
Amnesty India has initiated a crowd-sourced study on the abuse faced by Indian women politicians on Twitter, saying that online trolling aimed at threatening and silencing them must be considered a human rights violation.
A 2018 study covering 778 women journalists and politicians in the US and UK found that 7.1 percent of tweets sent to them between January and December 2017 were abusive or problematic. The journalists and politicians received abuse at similar rates, and women on both the right and the left of the political spectrum were targeted. The study revealed that women of colour were 34 percent more likely to be the targets of harassment than white women. Black women were targeted most of all: One in every 10 tweets sent to them was abusive or problematic, whereas for white women it was one in 15.
