Is What's Good For Facebook Not So Good For Democracy? - BillMoyers.com

The British think tank Demos (not to be confused with the US-based organization by the same name) ran a study mapping thousands of tweets and “found 6,500 unique users were targeted by 10,000 explicitly aggressive and misogynistic tweets.” They filtered tweets to attempt to avoid the kind of “naive censorship” Mak mentions, attempting to identify which tweets were genuinely abusive. They also noted that despite the study focusing specifically on misogynist abuse, 50 percent of the propagators of such tweets were women. Abuse, Mak notes, is certainly not specific to Twitter and certain other platforms, like Tumblr, “but it is endemic to those platforms.”