Indians daily post ‘millions’ of misogynistic tweets on the Elon Musk owned social media platform X (formerly Twitter), according to an alarming study of gender violence in the country.
The study defined online misogyny as consisting of six overlapping forms — sexist abuses, sexual objectification, threatening to physically or sexually harm women, asserting women’s inferiority, justifying violence against women, and dismissing feminist efforts.
Researchers from the UNICEF and University of California – San Diego, US, showed that similar to the offline world, women face increasing gender inequalities on social media platforms.
The study, published in the PLOS One journal, observes online misogyny on X in India to be prevalent.
It showed a significant rise in absolute volume as well as proportion of misogynistic tweets after the onset of Covid-19, relative to trends prior to the pandemic.
“Around 2 per cent of overall daily tweets between 2018 and 2021 included some form of misogynistic content,” the researchers said.
While this may seem small in number, it “translates to millions of misogynistic tweets every day, given that around 20 billion tweets are posted daily on average”.