Abstract Book of the 6th World Conference on Media and Communication
Year: 2025
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Social Media and the Gendering of Politics: Analyzing Harassment Faced by Female Politicians on Twitter in Pakistan
Amrat Haq, Hibba Najeeb Abbassi
ABSTRACT:
The present study addresses the significance and the problems of political harassment and gender-based violence against female politicians in Pakistan and violation of ethical guidelines on Twitter(X). It has been shown that these attacks constitute a violation of women’s civil and political rights and a threat to the physical and mental health of female politicians in Pakistan. Furthermore, there is no punishment of guilty parties, reparation, or moral or material compensation for the women who are affected. Gender-based violence and harassment in Pakistan Gender-based harassment and violence is a structural obstacle of women political participation in Pakistan. In this case, twitter as a Pakistani social media platform is studied based on the number of people to target the audience and based on the number of posts decade has been studied. An analytical tool of feminist media theory was applied to find out those elements that lead to a violation(s) based on gender. This paper reports one of the first studies on GBV in the social media. Considering Twitter as an open pervasive platform that provides means for open discourse and community engagement, we study female politicians accounts and examines their posts find out specific language nuances of GBV-related comments. The results indicate that social media site did not deny the violation of the ethical rules since the tales involved more of the unethical behaviors. Carefully, the violations involve abuse, misbehavior, judgmental speech, intimidation and sexual remark on any female politician.
Keywords: Online harassment; Female Politicians; Pakistan; Twitter; Content Analysis