Women of Color Running For Congress Face Higher Rates Of Hate On X, Study Reveals

Women running for Congress, especially women of color, were more likely to face offensive or hateful messages on the social platform X, a new study has revealed.

The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the University of Pittsburgh released a study Wednesday, revealing data from 800,000 posts made from May 20 to Aug. 23, mentioning congressional candidates with an account on X platform.

X has often been criticized for not doing enough to prevent hate speech and online abuse in recent years. The study mentioned that Asian American women running for Congress were the target of almost 23% of posts containing offensive language, including words or phrases meant to demean, threaten, insult or make fun of a candidate, the Hill reported.

About 21% of the posts were aimed at African American women candidates, while white women candidates received less at 18%. Talking about the Latina candidates, they were targeted slightly less than white women candidates -- at 16%.

"The consequences of the status-quo where women of color candidates are targeted with significant attacks online at much higher rates than other candidates create an immense barrier to creating a truly inclusive democracy," the study mentioned, the Hill reported.

Aside from being offensive, hate speech based on a candidate's identity such as their race, gender, sexual orientation or religion was also very common in such posts.

The official help website of X mentioned in a blog post last year that "research has shown that some groups of people are disproportionately targeted with abuse online." Researchers found that less than 1% of all posts mentioning a candidate included hate speech.

African American women running for Congress were the target of nearly 4% of these hate speech posts, which meant they were seven times more likely than African American men, three times more likely than white women and 18 times more likely than white men.

It is imperative that social media companies, researchers and political parties recognize that a person's identity affected how they were treated online, the CDT researchers said.

They also called on social media platforms to establish clear guidelines that prevent attacks targeting individuals based on their identity.