On the evening of 17 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 receiving a storm of abuse online. This was the reaction to a comment she had made about Haiti. She also tweeted: \u201cI speak from the heart (and of cource I may be wrong). But the crap I get in response just isnt on; really it isnt.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the days that followed, Beard received support from several high-profile people. Greg Jenner, a fellow celebrity historian, tweeted about his own experience of a Twitterstorm: \u201cI\u2019ll always remember how traumatic it was to suddenly be hated by strangers. Regardless of morality \u2013 I may have been wrong or right in my opinion \u2013 I was amazed (later, when I recovered) at how psychologically destabilising it was to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those tweeting support for Beard \u2013 irrespective of whether they agreed with her initial tweet that had triggered the abusive responses \u2013 were themselves then targeted. And when one of Beard\u2019s critics, fellow Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal, a woman of Asian heritage, set out her response to Beard\u2019s original tweet in an online article, she received her own torrent of abuse.<\/p>\n
There is overwhelming evidence that women and members of ethnic minority groups are disproportionately the target of Twitter abuse. Where these identity markers intersect, the bullying can become particularly intense, as experienced by black female MP Diane Abbott, who alone received\u00a0nearly half<\/a>\u00a0of 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 per cent more abusive tweets than their white female colleagues even when Abbott was excluded from the total.<\/p>\nReference:<\/h4>\n
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