Gendered Online Toxicity During COVID-19

The adverse effects of online sexism have become increasingly challenging to address due to their silencing effect, which is both normalized and subtle.Since behaviors specific to the COVID-19 Pandemic (e.g., wearing face masks) should not differ along gendered lines, any disparity in the genders' outrage would suggest that gendered hostility and punishment are intrinsic to contemporary social life and are not confined to gender-coded behaviors with roots in our past.In other words, hostility is an expression of gender bias rather than a reaction to different behavior by gender.This research examines the differences in the volume and content of toxicity directed towards men and women using a sample of tweets posted to Twitter in English from December 2019 to December 2021 (N= 5,000,000).The LDA topic model results suggested that men received more tweets containing outrage than women.Still, women were targeted with more gendered hostility, including but not limited to gendered slurs and phrases that incite sexual violence.Social media platforms must take preventative measures to limit the spread of toxicity.