Results show that attacks capitalize on established strategies of gender-based violence, including moral degradation, body shaming and rape threats. A vast number of interlocked discursive strategies can be identified: women in politics are not only shamed for not being pretty, thin and feminine enough, but also attacked for not being intelligent or capable enough and despised for being either too emotional or too aggressive. This paints an overall picture where gender stereotyping is still prevalent and represents a core aspect of gender-based violence also in the cybersphere. A considerable amount of linguistic creativity and irony is also at play, which contributes to the mainstreaming of cyberviolence as episodes of “hate-play” or “recreational nastiness” (Jane 2014) and to an overall normalization of violence as an integral and harmless act of digital citizenship.
Gender-based cyberviolence against women in EU politics is also characterized by the appropriation of the vast array of new, digitally native meaning-making resources such as memes, gifs and emojis. In particular, given the primacy of the visual across digital media, image-based violence has come to represent a real staple of the cybersphere, where new affordances like image modification and new trends like meme culture capitalise on long-standing, established strategies of gender-based sexism and objectification of women’s bodies.
The analysis also focused on a trans-linguistic and trans-cultural comparison of gender-based cyberviolence across different linguistic landscapes and political cultures in Europe. On the one hand, online hate emerges from this study as a culture-bound phenomenon that hooks into the background culture, symbols, narratives, myths and topoi of the respective societies in order to be successful. On the other hand, results are also characterized by a worrying uniformity in the gender-based nature of violence against those women who have a public presence and elbow for recognition in the male-dominated political arena. Many instances of gender-based cyberviolence are not only targeted violence but are also grounded in reflections on the fundamental incompatibility of women with political roles.
Theoretical implications and transdisciplinary methods represented a core reflection throughout the project. WONT-HATE caters to the need for more integrated methodologies able to account for multimodality as an intrinsic feature of the social media communication paradigm, as well as for the complex multi-directional processes of recontextualization which characterize the production and consumption of digital content. In particular, it addresses the main methodological challenges posed by the inherent non-linearity and fleeting nature of data in the participatory web.
WONT-HATE data is FAIR/O, with regulated access given the sensitive nature of data. The WONT-HATE database is expected to be useful to scholars across the field of Social Sciences (Linguistics, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology) as well as associations (Amnesty International, UN Women, Interparliamentary Union) interested in investigating the phenomenon of cyberhate in general (e.g. from a linguistic, sociological or psychological perspective) or the instances of misogynous digital hostility against women in politics in the specific.
