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Jacinda Ardern, Judith Collins and Chlöe Swarbrick were the New Zealand candidates with the most “toxic” messages directed at them during this year’s elections. Photo / RNZ / Dom Thomas / Simon Rogers
By RNZ
A Twitter bot has been working to find and combat abusive tweets targeting female candidates in the New Zealand elections.
During the campaigns, Parity BOT collected more than 200,000 “toxic” messages about the New Zealand candidates, most directed at Jacinda Ardern, Judith Collins and Chlöe Swarbrick.
Jacqueline Comer is the creative technologist working with Areto Labs to bring this technology to New Zealand for the first time.
Comer told Morning Report that the bot detected a ‘toxic’ tweet while processing messages to candidates through a machine learning model with filters.
“Once a tweet goes through one filter that says ‘yes, this is probably toxic’, then goes through another, there are seven of them. Then once you get 90 percent of ‘most likely toxic,’ the bot responds with a positive tweet to balance the negativity on Twitter.
“We also did an experiment in the New Zealand elections by replying to some of the candidates with a positive tweet, so if they received a toxic tweet, we would not reply to that toxic tweet, we would just reply to the candidate with a positive message, so they really started to see some of that within their own timeline. “
However, the bot focused solely on female candidates to “raise awareness that female candidates tend to face more toxicity on social media,” he said. So there was no data to compare ‘toxic’ posts with male candidates in New Zealand.
Women often received “horrible” messages, with filters capable of detecting profanity, talking about sexual violence, rape and death threats.
“They are quite vile and quite disappointing,” Comer said.
While it’s unclear how far the reach of the positive tweets went, he said there was a lot of community engagement in New Zealand with the bot, which has also been featured in the Canadian elections and the current US presidential elections. .
“I think we had more participation from the community [in New Zealand]. For whatever reason, the people here really understood what Parity BOT was all about, they were very supportive, we got a lot of questions within the community on Twitter and then on our website. “
– RNZ
