Where do the supportive tweets about women come from? Are they automatically or manually generated?
Manualy (volunteers composed them)
Including diverse voices in political decision-making strengthens our democratic institutions. Within the Canadian political system, there is gender inequality across all levels of elected government. Online abuse, such as hateful tweets, leveled at women engaged in politics contributes to this inequity, particularly tweets focusing on their gender. In this paper, we present ParityBOT: a Twitter bot which counters abusive tweets aimed at women in politics by sending supportive tweets about influential female leaders and facts about women in public life. ParityBOT is the first artificial intelligence-based intervention aimed at affecting online discourse for women in politics for the better. The goal of this project is to: $1$) raise awareness of issues relating to gender inequity in politics, and $2$) positively influence public discourse in politics. The main contribution of this paper is a scalable model to classify and respond to hateful tweets with quantitative and qualitative assessments. The ParityBOT abusive classification system was validated on public online harassment datasets. We conclude with analysis of the impact of ParityBOT, drawing from data gathered during interventions in both the $2019$ Alberta provincial and $2019$ Canadian federal elections.
Our political systems are unequal, and we suffer for it. Diversity in representation around decision-making tables is important for the health of our democratic institutions BIBREF0. One example of this inequity of representation is the gender disparity in politics: there are fewer women in politics than men, largely because women do not run for office at the same rate as men. This is because women face systemic barriers in political systems across the world BIBREF1. One of these barriers is online harassment BIBREF2, BIBREF3. Twitter is an important social media platform for politicians to share their visions and engage with their constituents. Women are disproportionately harassed on this platform because of their gender BIBREF4. To raise awareness of online abuse and shift the discourse surrounding women in politics, we designed, built, and deployed ParityBOT: a Twitter bot that classifies hateful tweets directed at women in politics and then posts “positivitweets”. This paper focuses on how ParityBOT improves discourse in politics. Previous work that addressed online harassment focused on collecting tweets directed at women engaged in politics and journalism and determining if they were problematic or abusive BIBREF5, BIBREF3, BIBREF6. Inspired by these projects, we go one step further and develop a tool that directly engages in the discourse on Twitter in political communities. Our hypothesis is that by seeing “positivitweets” from ParityBOT in their Twitter feeds, knowing that each tweet is an anonymous response to a hateful tweet, women in politics will feel encouraged and included in digital political communitiesBIBREF7. This will reduce the barrier to fair engagement on Twitter for women in politics. It will also help achieve gender balance in Canadian politics and improve gender equality in our society.