For many years, the video games industry strenuously denied any link between playing violent video games and exhibiting violent behavior in the real world. While such a link remains largely unproven, new research from the University of New South Wales suggests there is a very real link between the misogyny of tweets in an area and levels of domestic violence.
“We found that misogynistic social media may not be harmless,” the researchers explain. “It contributes to norms of violence toward women and a hostile worldview that may slip into real-world violence. I imagine a lot of people are fairly flippant about what is posted on social media.”
Hostile view
The authors argue that even if the original posters of misogynistic content are not violent themselves, some of those who read it may well be, especially as the more hateful content is posted the more hostile the atmosphere towards women becomes.
The study is one of the first to use big data to predict domestic violence from our activity on social media. The data, which was gathered between 2013 and 2014 was married with data reported by local law enforcement agencies across the United States related to domestic and family violence. They also gathered population-level data on things that are known to influence domestic violence, such as income inequality, population size, and the availability of alcohol.
The tweets were coded for misogynistic content using an automated method, with a geolocation algorithm then used to determine the origin of the tweets based on Census-defined areas. In total, they had tweets from 827 areas from 47 states.
“We then combined the data sets and used the number of misogynistic tweets in each area to examine the relationship between misogynistic tweets and domestic and family violence arrests, while controlling for things like alcohol availability, population, and inequality,” the researchers explain.
Criminal insights
The researchers explain that there’s is part of a growing body of studies that are looking at the way in which social media can help us to better understand criminal activity, and maybe even predict crime levels.
“Other studies have used social media to predict theft, public disorder during right-wing events, and violence and arrests during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests,” they say.
“Our research contributes to this imperative by finding out how social media can help determine where domestic and family violence is likely to occur.
“That information could be useful for not only law enforcement but also public health interventions which may intervene to counteract norms of misogynistic violence.”
