More than 3,000 offensive tweets sent to MPs every day, joint investigation finds

Birmingham Yardley MP Jess Phillips said the level of online abuse had created an “unsustainable” culture where MPs are afraid to speak their minds on vital issues
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More than 3,000 offensive tweets are sent to UK MPs every day, according to a joint investigation by the publishers of BirminghamWorld, the BBC and others.

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

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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.

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.

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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.

Labour MP Jess Phillips. Picture: PALabour MP Jess Phillips. Picture: PA
Labour MP Jess Phillips. Picture: PA

The hack day

On 28 April this year, the Shared Data Unit held a ‘Hack Day’, inviting 25 journalists and data analysts from around the BBC and its partner network to test the dataset.

Delegates from BirminghamWorld’s parent company NationalWorld ITV, Reach, Newsquest, and Birmingham City University and Iliffe Media joined together with the aim of opening up that dataset in groups, finding out what sort of things people were saying in tweets mentioning MPs and discussing how they could define the toxic proportion of it.

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They were also joined on the day by a series of guests including Mike Wendling, author and former editor of the BBC’s disinformation unit, and Jess Phillips.

What’s been said about the research?

Pete Sherlock, Assistant Editor at the BBC Shared Data Unit, said: “This investigation shows how much can be achieved through collaborative journalism. 

“By bringing a wide range of journalists from across the UK together alongside data scientists and academics, we were able to produce content we would not have been able to do as individuals.”

Paul Bradshaw, Professor of Journalism at Birmingham City University and BBC Shared Data Unit, says: “The shared data unit team created a number of ‘recipes’ so that journalists from local newspapers and broadcasters could use a range of AI technologies to find stories in almost 3 million tweets mentioning MPs.

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“These included machine learning - which makes it possible to ‘learn’ how likely, for example, a sentence is toxic - and natural language processing - which makes it possible to extract the adjectives, names or nouns from a passage of text.

“The journalists also used a form of machine learning called unsupervised learning to group tweets into common themes, making it easier for reporters to find the ‘needle in a haystack.”

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