According to researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, female candidates running in the 2024 European Parliament elections faced significantly higher volumes of sexist abuse and personal attacks on X (formerly Twitter) than their male counterparts. Analyzing over 3.2 million posts directed at 88 candidates across France, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, the study reveals a pervasive digital gender gap and semiotic violence.
The Data Architecture of Online Toxicity
To quantify digital hostility, the research team utilized Perspective API, a system designed to detect toxic language in online comments. The system evaluates text on a scale from zero to one, classifying toxicity as any remark deemed rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable enough to drive a user away from a conversation.
Nearly 80 percent of all evaluated candidates received toxic replies. But raw data extraction exposed a deep structural divide. Female politicians absorbed a disproportionate share of the abuse. Even when women published fewer total posts than men on X, they pulled in significantly higher volumes of responses overall—both benign and toxic.
Researchers filtered out the 2,700 most toxic responses, defined by a severity score where at least nine out of ten human evaluators flagged the comment as toxic. Out of that extreme cohort, 71 percent of the vitriol targeted female candidates. One in every four women running for office encountered remarks of a sexual nature.
Men were certainly not immune to online hostility. However, attacks against male politicians tended to target their professional conduct, policy decisions, or personality. They faced accusations of corruption, incompetence, or dishonesty. Their actions were on trial; for women, their very presence was under assault.
Semiotic Violence and the Marginalization of Female Leaders
As Arianna Sala, one of the scientists behind the Joint Research Centre project, pointed out, identity-based insults send a fundamentally different message than standard political disagreement. Instead of signaling a policy dispute, sexualized insults and degrading personal attacks communicate a clear exclusionary intent: you do not belong here.
This phenomenon constitutes what specialists define as semiotic violence—hostility transmitted through language and symbols specifically engineered to delegitimize women as political actors. Compounding the issue, female candidates frequently received multiple toxic replies to a single post, a compounding effect less often observed on men’s accounts. Candidates representing left-leaning political parties also experienced elevated targeting.
These findings align with a broader body of research showing that digital hostility against female politicians transcends specific national borders, regional cultures, or individual social media platforms.
The Technical and Regulatory Imperative
While Sala commended the European Union for adopting standards against cyberviolence, she stressed that digital platforms must act and take gender into account in moderation policies.
Digital infrastructure providers must evolve their responses as online violence adapts.
Related reading
