Social media attacks against female Canadian journalists
Ahmed Al-Rawi- 1Simon Fraser University, Canada
I investigate in this brief empirical study the social media attacks against female Canadian journalists who have frequently been targeted with online abuse. I used purposive sampling to focus on three journalists: Rachel Gilmore (formerly with Global News), Erica Iffil (freelance with The Hill Times), and Saba Eitizaz (Toronto Star). I employed a mixed method approach to conduct this study by collecting all the available Twitter replies to these three journalists (n=402,821) posted by 84,962 unique users. The digital analysis results show that there are slight differences in the quantity of attacks on these journalists, but the qualitative assessment of images associated with tweets indicate the need to use manual approaches to better understand the nuances and quality of these disinformation and often racist attacks.
Keywords: Social Media, Female Canadian journalists, disinformation, racialized attacks, Online abuse
Received: 18 Jul 2023;
Accepted: 25 Sep 2023.
Copyright: © 2023 Al-Rawi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Dr. Ahmed Al-Rawi, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada