Lest you think the mainstream media are some deep-seated enemy of tradition, know that their opposition to tradition is selective: in fact, they now seem keen to apply chivalry to female politicians and protect them from negative comments on social media.
What it essentially says is, “Don't hit girls!”
Perhaps coincidentally, these concerns seem to have emerged after Kamala Harris became the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, and a cynic might think this was all born out of a desire to help Harris get elected.
(It is fortunate that there are no cynics among New Americans.)
Mashable reports on the incident:
According to the Digital Hate Combat Center, Instagram is failing to prevent abuse of female politicians on its platform.
A new study finds that 1 in 25 comments on female politicians' Instagram posts are likely to be “highly” harmful, and Instagram fails to act on 93% of reported abusive comments targeting female politicians. The CCDH calls on Instagram to transparently enforce its community guidelines and support female politicians in dealing with online abuse, and also urges MPs to hold social media companies to account for abuse on their platforms.
…CCDH researchers selected 10 incumbent female politicians from across the political spectrum who are running for office in 2024 and collected 560,000 comments on their Instagram posts from January to June 2024. The politicians were selected based on their high digital engagement, and the comments studied included comments on posts from Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Rep. Marsha Blackburn.
Leveraging Google's Perspective AI tool, which is trained to identify harmful text, the study found over 20,000 “rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comments.” It's unclear whether all 20,000 comments violated Instagram's Community Agreement, but the study went a step further, having two researchers sift through the comments to identify the 1,000 most vile comments and report them to Instagram. After a week, 926 of the reported comments remained on the platform. These comments included sexist and racist remarks, death and rape threats, and more…
Of course, it's not uncommon for vulgar comments to be posted online, but what's interesting is that despite all the time, money and effort the CCDH spent on their “research,” they apparently haven't identified what percentage of “harmful” comments directed at male politicians are “flagged” as inappropriate and then removed by Instagram. So how are their findings relevant?
For all we know, the online environment may be even worse for male politicians.
Things certainly look bad in the case of Donald Trump, for example: Has any American politician ever been so viciously vilified?
It's not rocket science to work out that the CCDH's findings are meaningless without data on male politicians, so it's unlikely that not collecting such data was a simple oversight. It's more likely that the group recognized that such data would weaken its feminist argument and therefore simply avoided even collecting it.
With regards to this election, it would undoubtedly be to Democrats' advantage if hateful anti-Trump comments were allowed to flourish on social media while negative anti-Harris posts were removed.
Pressing against this double standard, CCDH complains that “Instagram is not addressing 92% of the offensive comments targeted at Kamala Harris” (without mentioning any anti-Trump posts). Among other things, the group says Harris is being targeted with “the cliché that women sleep their way to the top.” But the problem is:
If Harris didn't rise to the top through sex, she certainly rose to the center by being the mistress of the once powerful California politician Willie Brown, so this is an important question of character and competence for voters to consider.
Nevertheless, the CCDH wrote that such discussion should be censored, and that “legislators must hold the platform (Instagram) accountable for failing to protect women.”
So this group probably wouldn't want their VP to be called “Heel's Up Harris.” But what about her running mate being called “No Balls Waltz,” an allusion to the Minnesota governor's cowardice? Isn't that a “sexist” remark against men? CCDH has no say.
Readers who responded to the Mashable article also pointed out this double standard. For example, one top commenter wrote, “Feminists want equality and fairness,” which means “to be treated the same as men.”
But that's not the case, according to the CCDH, who claim that the purpose of gender-specific online abuse is to “exclude women from politics” (a conspiracy!). They go on to say that “a 2016 Data & Society survey found that 41% of young women aged 15-29 self-censor online to avoid online harassment.”
Again, the CCDH makes no mention of how many young men are doing the same thing, but women are certainly more likely to do it than men, even if they face the same criticism. And why?
Think about it: Men generally know that the dry, male-bonding humor that men use among themselves — jokes about weight, for example — can bring tears to a woman's eyes. This reality of taking things more seriously is why, as studies have found, women lie more than men: they're highly sensitive to emotions, and they lie to avoid hurting people's feelings (among other reasons).
The problem is that when women enter politics and participate in devising civil order, bringing with them the injunction “don't hurt feelings!” this can lead to speech restrictions and “hate speech” laws that censor the truth (“the truth hurts,” we are told).
Some men may encourage this by exercising a false sense of chivalry (is this similar to the issue of female combatants, where male soldiers change their behavior to protect their female companions?).
Either way, for the good of the nation, female politicians have to endure the same harsh criticism as their male counterparts. And some might say that if they can't take the heat, they should go back to the kitchen. Equal rights, equal fight.
But this is less about caring about women and more about unfairly winning elections. In fact, CCDH's analysis of criticism of five Republican and five Democratic female politicians seems designed to create the illusion of nonpartisanship. After all, if the Democratic candidate was Kamal Harris and the Republicans had Donald Trump, would there be as much concern today about online abuse of female candidates?
