Julie has been tweeting and RT'ing this new
Guardian article about online "abuse" of women all damn day. Basically, The Guardian decided that women are more abused online than men, they then searched through their comments to prove that premise and, surprise surprise, they found evidence that aligns with their claims. Julie is acting like this is V-Day or something. But I have some thoughts...
Quote:
New research into our own comment threads provides the first quantitative evidence for what female journalists have long suspected: that articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about.
Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.
See that, people? We found what we were looking for! With a little racism and antisemitism to boot. But...what is "abuse", how does "abuse" break down quantitatively?
Quote:
To date, 1.4 million comments (2% of the total) have been blocked by Guardian moderators because they violated the Guardian’s community standards. Most of these are abusive to some degree (they may use insulting language, or be ad hominem attacks) or are so off-topic that they derail the conversation.
That's right. Blocked comments...by Guardian moderators. Derailing conversations, insulting language (not just insults, mind you), and ad hominem attacks are now classified as "abusive". This is up there with the study that labels any inebriated sex as "sexual assault". From their "full methodology" section, for those of you wondering just how in the hell someone can quantize abuse via the mere existence of blocked comments:
Quote:
In our analysis we took blocked comments as an indicator of abuse and/or disruption. Although mistakes sometimes happen in decisions to block or not block, we felt the data set was large enough to give us confidence in the findings.
Funny that they use "data set" to come off as officious in their statistical analysis, but any high school AP Stats student can tell you that just because a sampling population is large, doesn't mean it isn't biased. Instead of just sampling 2 families from Englewood, you could take 2,000, and your study extrapolating family income for the City of Chicago would still be horribly biased.
But hey, let's not let that get in the way of a good narrative confirmed by asinine interpretation of biased data!
Back to the "study" that JDC is so excited about:
Quote:
This gender gap is bigger in some sections than others. Sport had the smallest proportion of articles written by women writers, but World News and Technology were not far behind. The only section that had significantly more articles written by women was Fashion.
So, Sports, Tech and World News feature predominately male writers, and the Fashion section is predominately female scribes, OK? That will be important in a bit.
Quote:
Articles written by women got more blocked (ie abusive or disruptive) comments across almost all sections. But the more male-dominated the section, the more blocked comments the women who wrote there got (look at Sport and Technology). Fashion, where most articles were written by women, was one of the few sections where male authors consistently received more blocked comments.
Gee, imagine that. In a section dominated by one gender or the other, with fewer articles off which to study, the opposite gender sees some wild variance in the number of blocked comments. It's almost like there might be a giant gaping issue of sample size here, on top of the myriad of other biasing issues.
Quote:
Another way of looking at this, is that since around 2010 articles written by women consistently attracted a higher proportion of blocked comments than articles written by men.
Any attempt to unpack that? Any proposition and testing of a null hypothesis--say, moderators on the freaking Guardian might just be a weee bit more protective of female staff vis a vis "abusive" comments? Nope. Just suck on that, MRA's, they've got contextual-less data. And why only since 2010? This is being heralded as "definitive" in part because it purports its data to go all the way back to 1999. But why cut off the data at 2010 here?
The kicker:
Quote:
Less extreme “author abuse” – demeaning and insulting speech targeted at the writer of the article or another comment – is much more common on all online news sites, and it formed a significant proportion of the comments that were blocked on the Guardian site, too.
Here are some examples: a female journalist reports on a demonstration outside an abortion clinic, and a reader responds, “You are so ugly that if you got pregnant I would drive you to the abortion clinic myself”; a British Muslim writes about her experiences of Islamophobia and is told to “marry an ISIS fighter and then see how you like that!”; a black correspondent is called “a racist who hates white people” when he reports the news that another black American has been shot by the police. We wouldn’t tolerate such insults offline, and at the Guardian we don’t tolerate it online either.
The Guardian also blocked ad hominem attacks (on both readers and journalists): comments such as “You are so unintelligent”, “Call yourself a journalist?” or “Do you get paid for writing this?” are facile and add nothing of value to the debate.
“Dismissive trolling” was blocked too – comments such as “Calm down, dear”, which mocked or otherwise dismissed the author or other readers rather than engaged with the piece itself.
So now, being dismissive is abuse. This is the depths to which SJW's will go to highlight their own plight.
x Infinity
Oh, and if you go to look at their charts, especially on the "average comments blocked by gender" one...you'll notice on the right that the actual difference between men and women in blocked comments is sub-1%, if their graphs are to-scale. This is the hill they choose to die on.
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