On the occasion of the 2017 UK election campaign, Amnesty International conducted a large-scale, sentiment-based
analysis of online hate speech against women MPs on Twitter (Dhrodia 2018), identifying
the “Top 5” most attacked women MPs as Diane Abbott, Joanna Cherry, Emily Thornberry, Jess Phillips and Anna Soubry.
Taking Amnesty International’s results as a starting point, this paper investigates online misogyny against the
“Top 5” women MPs, with a specific focus on the video-sharing platform YouΤube, whose loosely censored cyberspace is known as a
breeding ground for antagonism, impunity and disinhibition (Pihlaja 2014), and,
therefore, merits investigation.
By collecting and analysing a corpus of YouTube multimodal data we explore, critique and contextualize online
misogyny as a techno-social phenomenon applying a Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) approach (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). Mapping a vast array of discursive strategies, this study offers an
in-depth analysis on how technology-facilitated gender-based violence contributes to discursively constructing the political arena
as a fundamentally male-oriented space, and reinforces stereotypical and sexist representation of women in politics and
beyond.
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