Diane Abbott and Online Misogyny: Being a Female Politician in the Digital Era

In recent years, hate speech online has become one of the most frequent forms of human rights violations. It has developed an inherent gender dimension, as women and LGBTQ+ people become targets of verbal abuse at a significantly higher rate (Titley et al. 2012). In addition, political discourse is growing on social media and, increasingly, female politicians are victims of disparaging and vicious comments, insults, rape and death threats and even simulated sexual violence (Powell and Nicola 2017). Thus, «the expansion of Web 2.0 as a political forum necessitates greater insight into the gendered constructions of political candidates online» (Ritchie 2013: 106). A corpus of verbal and visual texts collected from the Instagram official profile of Diane Abbott, a British Labour Party representative, has been investigated from a multimodal discourse analysis perspective focusing on the correlation between the political persuasion adopted by a female politician and the degree of hostility received. Following social semiotic studies of social media (Jones 2009; Adami 2014; Zappavigna 2013, 2016; Zhao and Zappavigna 2017), the study explores how Diane Abbott’s posts on the Instagram raise abusive and aggressive comments in order to silence her voice and exclude her from the digital public sphere. Moreover, a multimodal approach will allow us to verify whether verbal and visual communication strengthens detrimental representations of female politicians.