One evening in February 2018, Professor Mary Beard posted on Twitter a photograph of herself crying. The eminent University of Cambridge classicist, who has almost 200,000 Twitter followers, was distraught: after making a comment about Haiti, she had received a storm of abuse online. She later added: “I speak from the heart (and of cource [sic] I may be wrong). But the crap I get in response just isnt [sic] on; really it isn’t.”
In the days that followed, Beard received support from several high-profile people – even if not all of them agreed with her initial tweet. They were themselves then targeted. And when one of Beard’s critics, fellow Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal, a woman of Asian heritage, set out her response to Beard’s original tweet in an online article, she also received a torrent of abuse.
Women and members of ethnic minority groups are disproportionately the target of Twitter abuse, including death threats and threats of sexual violence. Where these identity markers intersect, the bullying can become particularly intense – as experienced by black female MP Diane Abbott, who alone received nearly half of all the abusive tweets sent to female MPs during the run-up to the 2017 UK general election. Black and Asian female MPs received on average 35% more abusive tweets than their white female colleagues even when Abbott was excluded from the total.
