Understanding abuse targeted towards public figures

Introduction

We apply our work on building better AI classifiers for hate to data collected from social media, in order to study the dynamics of online abuse targeted at public figures in the UK, including athletes, politicians, and journalists.

We study:

• The prevalence and trends in abuse (how much and when)
• The targets of abuse (which individuals and groups)
• The content of abuse (what topics is it centered around)
• The perpetrators of abuse (who is sending it)
• Engagement with abuse
• onnections between online abuse and real-world events.

We published a joint report with Ofcom in 2022 into abuse targeted at Premier League Footballers.