Female 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidates Face a 'Gender Penalty' Online, Study Finds

[demmiblue]

A new analysis of Twitter and news coverage surrounding the Democratic primary candidates for the U.S. 2020 presidential elections shows that female candidates are attacked significantly more often than male candidates by trolls and fake news accounts.

The report, published Nov. 5 by Lucina Di Meco, Global Fellow at The Wilson Center, used artificial intelligence in partnership with non-partisan data analytics firm Marvelous AI to track the coverage of six Democratic candidates on Twitter, measuring the volume of conversation around each candidate between December 2018 and April 2019. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar were the candidates included in the study, which forms part of the broader report titled #ShePersisted: Women, Politics and Power in the New Media World.

These online conversations were analyzed for one week after each candidate’s official campaign launch between December 2018 and April 2019, depending on the candidate. Marvelous AI also examined the political bias and credibility of Twitter users participating in the conversation, as well as the themes and narratives surrounding each candidate.

For each candidate, tweets were collected for a week following their official campaign kickoff. The volume of conversation around each candidate on social media fell into a similar bracket across both the male and female candidates, peaking at around 40,000 to 50,000 tweets per day, with Kamala Harris generating significantly more attention on Twitter than others in the field.

https://time.com/5717376/female-democratic-candidates-2020-twitter-study/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_term=politics_2020-election&linkId=76504638