Women of color running for office face higher rates of violent threats online
Less than four hours after Kentucky state Rep. Attica Scott (D) announced last year that she planned to run for Congress, an email calling her a "slimey, ignorant c---" appeared in the inbox she uses for legislative business.
Scott's team had been running posts on social media all day promoting her campaign, and she immediately recognized the threatening note filled with slurs as an attempt to silence her.
"The threat I received was to immediately try to shut me down, try to stop me before I even got started with the campaign," Scott said in an interview with The Washington Post. "It's designed to have that chilling effect, that silencing effect."
Scott decided to stay the course, ultimately carrying out the campaign until she lost in the Democratic primary in May. But she constantly receives harassing messages in her work email, on her voice mail and across social networks, including messages attacking her appearance or saying her mother should have aborted her. The threats have become so frequent that she regularly takes steps to protect her privacy online, like waiting until after she leaves an event to post about it to protect her geolocation information.
Scott's experience signals a hurdle disproportionately confronting women of color running for office. They are more than four times as likely as White candidates to be targeted with violent abuse, according to a new study by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that has received funding from tech companies, that was shared exclusively with The Washington Post.
They're also twice as likely as other candidates to be targeted with misinformation and disinformation. Women of color were also at least five times more likely than other candidates to be targeted with tweets related to their identity.
Dhanaraj Thakur, the research director at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), told The Post that such levels and abuse will result in maintaining the "unrepresentative status quo."
"A lack of representation means that we lose the important insights and solutions to public policy problems that women of color will bring," he said. "We all suffer if everyone does not have a seat at the table."
Women of color are increasingly represented in politics. But even as they ascend to the highest levels of government, there has been limited research to date into the online harassment confronting them. CDT's conclusions are based on an analysis of more than 100,000 tweets during the 2020 election that included mentions, replies or responses to a set of nearly 300 randomly selected candidates.
The researchers notably found that women of color on average faced a lower proportion than White men of abusive tweets that included generally offensive language. But they were far more likely to receive abusive tweets including sexism, racism or promotion of violence.
Scott said the vast majority of tweets she receives are not related to her policies.
"It's hardly ever about policy," she said. "It's almost always about me being a Black woman."
In addition to analyzing Twitter, the researchers sought to better understand the impact of online abuse by conducting anonymous interviews with more than a dozen candidates and staffers from 14 campaigns. In those interviews, researchers repeatedly heard that the aim of the online attacks was to destroy the candidates' resolve and force them to drop out of politics. Interviewees recounted instances on social media where people implied they wanted to have sex with them, or asked the politicians if they had an account on OnlyFans, a service known for hosting pornography.
"When it came to this, I felt I had never felt more dehumanized, more minimized in the work that I had done and the work that I was doing," said one candidate, whose identity was kept anonymous by the researchers.
There are existing laws that make threatening violence illegal. But Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Virginia who studies online harassment, says perpetrators are rarely prosecuted because law enforcement lacks the technical chops and resources to investigate online threats, especially when they're made anonymously, she said.
"If you start enforcing the law, it serves as a deterrent," said Citron, author of the book "The Fight for Privacy."
The entire tech industry also has a role to play in deterring online harassment, Citron and Thakur say. Major tech companies often have policies forbidding harassment, but they are unevenly enforced. The CDT report recommends that tech companies provide reports about election-related abuse before, during and after elections, and that companies also make data available that enables researchers to study these trends.
Scott says that her experiences have deterred other women that she knows from running for office. They say they cannot face the kind of abuse she has sustained, she said. She warned that online harassment against women of color is a "serious attack on our democracy."
"When we allow this to happen to women of color, we are saying we're are willing to allow our democracy to burn," she said.
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