The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and the University of Pittsburgh have released a report titled "Hated More: Online Violence Targeting Women of Color Candidates in the 2024 US Election." This research examines the nature of online offensive and hate speech directed at candidates running for Congress, with a focus on women of color.

Müge Finkel, Director of the Ford Institute for Human Security at the University of Pittsburgh, led the study with contributions from Steven Finkel, Daniel Wallace Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and several researchers from Koç University’s Center for Computational Social Sciences.

The report highlights that women face significant challenges when campaigning for political office in the U.S., especially regarding online attacks intended to undermine their participation in politics. Previous CDT research found that women of color Congressional candidates in 2020 experienced higher levels of violent and sexist abuse compared to other candidates. This trend appears to continue into the 2024 elections.

Researchers analyzed over 800,000 tweets posted between May 20 and August 23, 2024, mentioning any candidate running for Congress on X (formerly Twitter). The analysis included tweets mentioning U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris as a woman of color and presidential candidate. Fine-tuned language models identified tweets containing offensive or hate speech about these candidates.

Offensive speech is defined as words or phrases that demean, threaten, insult, or ridicule a candidate. Hate speech is characterized as offensive speech specifically targeting someone’s identity, such as race or gender. Findings indicate that women of color and African American women candidates face more offensive and hate speech than other groups.

For further details on this issue affecting political representation in the United States, readers are encouraged to review the full report.