“How dare you call her a pig, I know several pigs who would be upset if they knew”. A multimodal critical discursive approach to online misogyny against UK MPs on YouTube

On the occasion of the 2017 UK election campaign, Amnesty International conducted a large-scale, sentiment-based analysis of online hate speech against women MPs on Twitter ( Dhrodia 2018 ), identifying the “Top 5” most attacked women MPs as Diane Abbott, Joanna Cherry, Emily Thornberry, Jess Phillips and Anna Soubry. Taking Amnesty International’s results as a starting point, this paper investigates online misogyny against the “Top 5” women MPs, with a specific focus on the video-sharing platform YouΤube, whose loosely censored cyberspace is known as a breeding ground for antagonism, impunity and disinhibition ( Pihlaja 2014 ), and, therefore, merits investigation. By collecting and analysing a corpus of YouTube multimodal data we explore, critique and contextualize online misogyny as a techno-social phenomenon applying a Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) approach ( KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018 ). Mapping a vast array of discursive strategies, this study offers an in-depth analysis on how technology-facilitated gender-based violence contributes to discursively constructing the political arena as a fundamentally male-oriented space, and reinforces stereotypical and sexist representation of women in politics and beyond.