[Article] “Normalizing misogyny: hate speech and verbal abuse of female politicians on Japanese Twitter”

Social media platforms such as Twitter have gained tremendous political importance in recent years. Moreover, being considered as platforms for organizing grass root political movements or political participation in general, this positive view has given way to more critical perspectives on the negative sides of social media, such as attempts of algorithmically manipulating public opinion or the outcome of elections and racist or sexist hate speech. For the case of Japan, despite particularly xenophobic hate speech on bulletin boards such as “2channel” (ni-channeru) or Twitter has been extensively studied from various angles, misogynic forms of verbal abuse towards females on social media, female politicians in particular, have received much lesser attention in existing research. In this article we present results from an explorative analysis of instances of misogynist or sexist hate speech and abusive language against female politicians on Twitter, applying computational corpus-linguistic tools and methods, supplemented by a qualitative in-depth study of verbal abuse of four prominent female politicians, namely Renhō, Tsujimoto Kiyomi, Yamao Shiori, and Koike Yuriko, thereby fruitfully combining quantitative-statistical and qualitative-hermeneutic approaches.