Studying Toxicity on Twitter During the 2019 Federal Election in Canada

EasyChair Preprint 8045

Abstract

The goal of this study is to better understand the online dynamics of violence on Twitter against candidates running for office during the 2019 federal election in Canada. While some candidates tend to receive more extreme cases of online violence, such as the case of a hate campaign targeting a former environment minister and 2019 candidate Catherine McKenna, who received numerous online and offline threats, that variation is not necessarily explained by the candidate's gender. This study found that women candidates did not necessarily receive more tweets that are toxic or insulting. Since we only tested a sample of tweets (1%), future work will examine the full dataset of 363,706 public tweets posted in English to see whether our findings apply to the broad set of tweets that were aimed at candidates during the 2019 federal election.

Keyphrases: Twitter, online violence, politics, social media, toxicity

@booklet{EasyChair:8045,
  author    = {Anatoliy Gruzd and Philip Mai and Raquel Recuero and Felipe Bonow Soares},
  title     = {Studying Toxicity on Twitter During the 2019 Federal Election in Canada},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 8045},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}