Unveiling toxic discourse towards female politicians in Italy: A corpus-based approach

Musi, Elena ORCID: 0000-0003-2431-455X, Federico, Lorenzo and Mounim, Ayoub (2025) Unveiling toxic discourse towards female politicians in Italy: A corpus-based approach EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF WOMENS STUDIES, 32 (3). pp. 258-275. ISSN 1350-5068, 1461-7420

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Abstract

Social media have widened access to political participation but fuelled phenomena such as gendered toxicity that hinder democratic deliberation. While female politicians are recurrent targets of misogynistic attacks, existing moderation practices fail to adequately address the problem. Focusing on Twitter (now ‘X’), we provide the first systematic corpus analysis of the presence and the type of gendered toxicity towards Italian politicians, combining natural language processing with statistical and linguistic analysis. The results show a gender difference both in quantity and quality of toxic messages: while male politicians do not receive fewer toxic replies than female politicians overall, women do receive comments tailored to stereotypes (physical appearance, age, sexual habits) which constitute ad hominem attacks.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Computational social science, gendered toxicity, Italian politicians, Twitter
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences > School of the Arts
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	10 Jul 2025 10:57
Last Modified:	16 Jun 2026 20:24
DOI:	10.1177/13505068251352636
Related Websites:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3193666
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