Transcript Linguistics and the Mind/Brain

A Quantitative Look at Cyber-Abuse
on Salon.com
Alexandre Sévigny
Karin Humphreys
Dept of Communication Studies &
Multimedia
Dept of Psychology, Neuroscience
& Behaviour
McMaster University
[email protected]
McMaster University
[email protected]
Research Origins
• Salon.com - an online current affairs
magazine, the first of its kind
• Salon.com tried an experiment - allow
uncensored anonymous letters commenting
on the articles
• The letter section got nasty and we called to
quantitatively look at the letters.
Is Salon.com a good test case?
• Cyber abuse is a big problem on the internet,
but it is hard to gather good data.
• Salon.com offers:
– Controls on who authors are, letter writers are
– a homogenous reader profile …
– otherwise, hard to compare compeltely different
blogs with each others, etc)
– Is subject to a common set of editors
Joan Walsh, Ed., Salon.com
“ […] once I joined Salon I started receiving the creepiest
personal e-mails about my work. […] But it was hard to
know for sure how much had to do with my gender. David
Talbot was regularly attacked by wingnuts as a Clinton
"butt-boy," so it was impossible to say it was all about my
being a woman. It still seems that when a man comes in for
abuse online, he's disproportionately attacked as gay […] if
he is gay, […] his hate mail at Salon is likely to be […] heavy
on sexual imagery and insult, sometimes bordering on
violence. Yuck. I couldn't see into anyone else's inbox to be
sure if the abuse I was getting was disproportionate, but I
suspected it was. Mostly I just ignored it. ”
Joan Walsh, cont.
“ When Salon automated its letters, ideas that had only seen
our in boxes at Salon were suddenly turning up on the site.
And I couldn't deny the pattern: Women came in for the
cruelest and most graphic criticism and taunting. Gary
Kamiya summed it up well in a piece on overall online
feedback, noting "an ugly misogynistic aspect" to the
reaction to women writers. One thing I noticed early on: We
all got nicknames. I'm "Joanie," Rebecca Traister is "Becky,"
Debra Dickerson is "Debbie" and on and on. There are lots
of comments about our looks and sexuality or ... likability, to
avoid using the f-word, a theme you almost never see even
in angry, nasty threads about male writers. Most common is
a sneering undercurrent of certainty that the woman in
question is just plain stupid; it's hard to believe we have jobs
at all. ”
Joan Walsh, cont.
“ I will sound very P.C. saying this (as Bill O'Reilly
would be the first to note) but do we just find it
easier to bash women?" No, replied one writer:
The problem was "the kind of woman writer Salon
has been fond of publishing in the last few years
... Smug, self-satisfied, without any kind of real
difficulty except their sad inability to make the rest
of the world understand, and so appreciate, them
for who they are," and then he went on to name a
lot of us. Glad we cleared that up. ”
Greater Internet Jerk Theory
Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience
=
A TOTAL JERK
Salon.com Screenshot
Article Screen
Letters Entry Section
Research Questions
• Is gender of magazine author a
significant variable in the cyber abuse
contained in the letters?
• How does cyber abuse of female writers
differ from abuse of male writers?
Method: Sourcing
• Sourced letters from “News & Politics” and
“Opinions” sections
• Took letters written after Salon.com’s new
“verification” policy
• Explicitly excluded articles that dealt with
gender issues
• One article per writer per month (to get max.
# of unique writers)
Method: Sorting
• Ideas-critique –disagree with ideas
– no ref to “this author says…”
• Author/article critique:
– positive, negative, in-between
– one example of every unique author, randomly
selected amongst them
– number of letters indicator of degree of
controversy
Our Mini-Codebook
• Reference: author, article, salon, full name, first name, last
name, nickname, Mr./Ms./Dr., you/he/she, fullname-other
• Address: to author, to salon, other letter writers
• Subject: just about ideas, ad hominen attack, ad hominem
praise
• Qualifying-but: “I love Camille Pagilia's editorials. However,
she is still spouting the old Vietnam War histories.”
• Vitriol: “I'll remember how I am treated by you women the
next time a woman asks me to listen to her opinion on
anything.”
Ave rage Num be r of Le tte rs to Each Article
80.00
70.00
60.00
Female Male
• There were real trends in the data 59.05 58.75
• Cyber Abuse seemed to differ along several vectors
50.00
40.00
30.00
20.00
10.00
0.00
Female Authors
Male Authors
Num be r of Ne gative Le tte rs Pe r Article
18.00
16.00
14.00
12.00
Total
News
Opinion
9.60
5.50
15.75
3.74
1.96
4.67
10.00
8.00
6.00
4.00
2.00
0.00
Total
News
Female Authors
Opinion
Male Authors
Proportion of Ne gative Le tte rs pe r Article
0.25
0.20
Total
News
Opinion
0.14
0.09
0.21
0.07
0.04
0.09
0.15
0.10
0.05
0.00
Total
News
Female Authors
Opinion
Male Authors
Analys is of Le tte rs in Opinion Se ction
16
15
P ers onal
T o A uthor
M r/M s .
Firs t N ame
14
Mean # of Instances
12
15
4 .7
0 .2 8
1 .7 1
3 .5
4 .7
2 .5
0 .3 3
10
8
6
4.7
4
4.7
3.5
2.5
1.71
2
0.28
0.33
0
Personal
To Author
Mr/Ms.
Nature of Comments
Female Authors
Male Authors
First Name
Analys is of Le tte rs in OPINIONS
0.18
0.16
0.14
P ers onal
T o A uthor
M r/M s .
Firs t N ame
0 .1 2
0 .0 3
0 .0 0 2
0 .0 1 8
0 .0 4
0 .0 6
0 .1 6
0 .0 1 1
Proportion per Article
0.12
0.1
0.08
0.06
0.04
0.02
0
Personal
To Author
Mr/Ms.
Nature of Comment
Female Authors
Male Authors
First Name
Analys is of Com m e nts in OPINIONS
16
P ers onal
T o A uthor
14
15
4.7
12
Mean # per Article
10
8
6
4
2
0
Personal
To Author
Female Authors
Male Authors
3.5
4.7
Analys is of Com m e nts in OPINIONS
3
M r/M s .
Firs t Name
2.5
0.28
1.71
Mean # Per Article
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
Mr/Ms.
First Name
Female Authors
Male Authors
2.5
0.33
Analys is of Com m e nts in OPINIONS
0.14
P ers onal
T o A uthor
0.12
0.12
0 .1 2
0 .0 3
0 .0 4
0 .0 6
Proportion per Article
0.1
0.08
0.06
0.06
0.04
0.04
0.03
0.02
0
Personal
To Author
Female Authors
Male Authors
Analys is of Com m e nts in OPINIONS
0.18
0.16
0.16
0.14
Proportion per article
0.12
Mr/Ms.
0.002
0.16
First Name
0.018
0.011
0.1
0.08
0.06
0.04
0.018
0.02
0.011
0.002
0
Mr/Ms.
First Name
Female Authors
Male Authors
Summary of (prelim.) Results
• There were the same number of letters to articles
written by both genders.
• There were both a higher number and greater
proportion of negative letters to articles written by
female writers.
• Female writers are proportionally more often
addressed in a more familiar way.
• Female writers receive a greater proportion of
personal letters than male writers.
Availability Heuristic
• Some people generalize, saying “everybody
gets abused on the internet, not
predominantly women” because they have
seen specific examples of both types of
abuse.
• So, is it just that women are more sensitive,
and think they are being abused more?
• Empiricism: the only way to know is to
actually count so that we can fix the situation
So maybe we should ask...
Bill O’Reilly’s research
question…
“So hard to say, maybe the
women's articles are just all
poorer than the men’s and
attract more criticism?”
We have an answer, Bill.
• And we are starting to have the data
that demonstrates that you’re wrong.
• Empirical research will succeed where
cultural studies and critical theory have
abjectly failed.
• It’s easy to pooh-pooh a critical opinion
or theory but It’s hard to disagree with
the facts.
Future Directions
• This is a preliminary look into the data
• We are drilling down deeper and conducting
more sophisticated analyses to understand
the linguistic nature of the abuse
• Comparing abuse pre-validation and postvalidation
Thanks to the team at the
Cognitive Science Laboratory
McMaster University
http://cogsci.mcmaster.ca
Thanks to you for listening.