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AMPLIFIED ABUSE
Understanding Violence against Women in Politics and Leadership
A study on the 2021 Uganda General Elections
INTRODUCTION
The growth of internet users has brought about social and economic benefits on a global scale. However, significant harms such as online violence, disinformation, and hate speech have also proliferated in these online spaces. Discriminatory gendered practices are shaped by social, economic, cultural, and political structures in the physical world and are similarly reproduced online across digital platforms. Uganda, too, has experienced rising rates of online harassment targeting both visible women as well as everyday users.
Online violence manifests during periods of political activity. In order to understand how this report sought to identify and analyze the scale of online violence targeted at political candidates and high-profile individuals during the January 2021 General Election in Uganda. The report also sought to determine how this online harassment might impact their use, expression, and participation in the elections. For this purpose, we identified and monitored the accounts of 152 nominated candidates and 50 high-profile individuals during the campaign and election period on the two most widely used public platforms, Facebook and Twitter. Methodologies used include lexicon building focus group discussions, data scraping of publicly available profiles, qualitative data analysis, and development of a Machine Learning model to identify and tag instances of online violence and hate speech in both English and Luganda.
The Data
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Social Media Accounts Monitored
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Accounts actively used during campaigns
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Twitter replies collected
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Facebook comments collected
Research questions
The main objective of this study was to assess the impact of OVAW-P in Uganda and determine how it might impact Ugandan women in politics’ use of digital solutions and social media platforms for expression and participation in the elections.
The following research questions were used as a guide towards achieving this research objective:
- How do women politicians in Uganda use social media platforms for campaigning during the scientific general elections?
- How does the use of social media platforms differ amongst men and women candidates?
- What evidence of OVAW-P exists on social media platforms and how does it manifest?
- What is the association between OVAW-P and factors such as gender, age, political party affiliation, frequency of social media use, and electoral results?
Key findings from the study revealed that
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The use of social media platforms for engaging with voters and constituents by women politicians remains low in Uganda
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Women politicians in Uganda prefer using Facebook compared to Twitter for engaging with voters.
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Women politicians were more likely to experience violence on Twitter compared to Facebook
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Men and women experience online violence differently. Women are more likely to experience trolling, sexual remarks, and body shaming. Men are more likely to experience hate speech and satirical comments
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Greater online activity was linked with higher levels of online violence
How do women politicians in Uganda use social media platforms for campaigning during scientific general elections?
Our study found that nine out of every ten (89%) accounts were used to put out at least one tweet/post during the campaign period. Twitter was the most widely used platform with 92% of the candidates using the platform at least once during the monitoring period while Facebook had 86%. There was a considerable drop in social media usage during the month of January, which is greatly attributable to the internet shutdown in Uganda. In terms of gender, women were most active on Facebook while men dominated usage on Twitter. At least 69% of the accounts belonging to female candidates on Facebook were used at least once each week compared to the men at 47.5%.
How does online violence against women candidates differ from that of men in regards to factors such as the form of violence experienced, frequency across platforms?
Using sentiment analysis, the sentiment of the comments and replies from social media users to the candidates was analysed. According to the data, higher engagement by a candidate group leads to a higher volume of negative comments across both platforms. On Facebook, women candidates received 77% of negative comments while on Twitter, men candidates received 85.7% of negative replies.
Is there evidence of OVAW-P? If yes, what are the manifestations of OVAW-P?
Women candidates were more likely to experience trolling, sexual violence and body shaming compared to their male counterparts. Men candidates were more likely to experience hate speech and satirical speech as compared to women candidates. This trend was similarly observed across both social media platforms monitored. However, overall, across almost all categories, violence experienced by both women and men candidates on Twitter was higher than that on Facebook.
Does OVAW-P correlate with other factors such as age, party affiliation, election result, and frequency of social media use?
According to the data, online violence seemed to increase with an increase in age. Older woman candidates were more likely to experience trolling, insults, hate speech, body shaming, sexualised comments, and satirical content.
Are there noticeable links between the perpetrators and their victims?
Using network analysis, the accounts posting comments or replies to each gender were mapped out. The diagram shows that a higher number of unique accounts left comments or replies to men candidates (left cluster), compared to women candidates (right cluster). Fewer numbers of unique accounts posted comments or replies to men and women candidates (middle cluster). This could indicate that certain accounts target women specifically
