‘Social media companies getting away with facilitating harmful content’ - Birmingham MP speaks out

Birmingham Edgbaston MP Preet Gill has said she has been on the receiving end of ‘vile rhetoric and abuse’ on social media, and that female colleagues are overwhelmingly targeted much more than male colleagues.

Ms Gill’s comments follow new research by the publishers of BirminghamWorld, the BBC and others, which revealed that more than 3,000 offensive tweets are sent to UK MPs every day.

Journalists gathered and analysed three million tweets directed at MPs over the course of six weeks between March and April this year.

More than 130,000 of those tweets - which works out at around one in every 20 tweets - were deemed to be ‘toxic’ and female MPs were marginally more likely to receive abuse than their male counterparts.

‘Social media companies have gotten away with facilitating harmful content online’

Preet Kaur Gill, MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, told BirminghamWorld that abuse during the last General Election led to many female MPs stepping out of the political spotlight and giving up their seats in Parliament.

She said: “To me, these appalling figures come as absolutely no surprise. I have personally been on the receiving end of vile rhetoric and abuse on social media, and it is absolutely my experience that female colleagues are overwhelmingly targeted much more than male colleagues.

“In fact, at the last general election, it was this type of abuse which led to so many female MPs stepping out of the political spotlight and giving up their seats in Parliament. For too long, social media companies have gotten away with facilitating this harmful content online.

“Current UK regulation is from the analogue age and lags far behind the digital age in which most of us all now live. For the last four years we’ve seen this Government dither and delay around digital regulation.

“The Government has promised to tighten the rules in the online world for almost four years, but we are yet to see the Online Harms Bill with strong enough measures that is fit for purpose.”

The research

Birmingham Yardley MP Jess Phillips has said the level of abuse MPs receive on Twitter has created an “unsustainable” culture where politicians were afraid to speak their mind on important issues.

These tweets were analysed by a machine-learning tool built to identify harmful conversations online. It is one of the first times artificial intelligence (AI) has been used for a single journalism project by dozens of UK regional newsrooms.

The best-known politicians got a lot of tweets and abuse - but less well-known backbenchers got proportionally more abuse.

All 20 of the MPs to receive the largest share of toxic tweets were not members of the cabinet or shadow cabinet. Among them were backbenchers targeted for speaking out on transgender rights, MPs who defended Boris Johnson over Partygate, and an MP who criticised the actor Will Smith for his Oscars ceremony attack on Chris Rock.

Four out of five of the most prolific toxic tweeters against male and female MPs continued to have an active account in August. MPs have previously talked about being afraid to vote in certain ways or to exercise their public platform to speak about certain issues because they know the sheer amount of abuse they’re going to get.