Twitter abuse - '50% of misogynistic tweets from women'

Half of all misogynistic tweets posted on Twitter come from women, the BBC reports citing a study.

Over a three-week period, think tank Demos counted the number of uses of two particular words as indicators of misogyny.

It found evidence of large-scale misogyny, with 6,500 unique users targeted by 10,000 abusive tweets in the UK alone.

Twitter boss Jack Dorsey has said that tackling abuse is a priority.

The research comes as five UK MPs - Yvette Cooper, Maria Miller, Stella Creasy, Jo Swinson and Jess Phillips - launch their Reclaim the Internet campaign, in response to growing public concern about the impact of hate speech and abuse on social media.

The campaign has opened an online forum to discuss ways to make the internet less aggressive, sexist, racist and homophobic.

Launching the campaign, Ms Cooper told the BBC: "The truth is nobody knows what the best answers are. There is more when there is criminal abuse. for example rape threats, that the police should be doing but what is the responsibility of everyone else? What more should social media platforms be doing?"

She said that the campaign was an opportunity to "put forward their proposals and demands for the changes we want to see".

In response Twitter's head of trust and safety Kira O'Connor told the BBC: "Hateful conduct has no place on the Twitter platform and is a violation of our terms of service.

"In addition to our policies and user controls, such as block, mute and our new multiple tweet reporting functionality, we work with civil society leaders and academic experts to understand the challenge that exists."

The Demos study also looked at international tweets and found more than 200,000 aggressive tweets using the words, "slut" and "whore", were sent to 80,000 people over the same three weeks.

Demos used algorithms to distinguish between tweets being used in explicitly aggressive ways and those that were more conversational in tone.

Researcher Alex Krasodomski-Jones said: "This study provides a birds-eye snapshot of what is ultimately a very personal and often traumatic experience for women.

"While we have focused on Twitter, who are considerably more generous in sharing their data with researchers like us, it's important to note that misogyny is prevalent across all social media, and we must make sure that the other big tech companies are also involved in discussions around education and developing solutions."

She added that it was not about "policing the internet" but was more "a stark reminder that we are frequently not as good citizens online as we are offline".