These Two Vicious Words Are Tweeted 10,000 Times a Day

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To reach this conclusion, Demos analyzed tweets that contained the words “slut” or “whore” over a three-week period in April and May. Then, they divided the tweets into four categories: self-referencing, conversational, comments on misogynistic issues, and those that were explicitly aggressive.

Researchers discovered that tweeters sent 200,000 aggressive tweets with the s- and w-words to 80,000 unique users during the three-week time frame. And it’s not just a guy thing: Girl-on-girl hate accounted for half of those tweets.

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“It is clear that just as the digital world has created new opportunities for public debate and social interaction, it has also built new battlegrounds for the worst aspects of human behavior,” says Alex Krasodomski-Jones, a researcher in the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, in a press release. “This is less about policing the internet than it is a stark reminder that we are frequently not as good citizens online as we are offline.”

So, let’s recap: Women are getting called sluts and whores on Twitter by men and women almost 10,000 times a day—and that’s not even counting the comments that weren’t labeled as explicity aggressive.

What. The. Eff.