Gender-Based Violence in 140 Characters or Fewer: A #BigData Case Study of Twitter

TL;DR

This study analyzes nearly fourteen million tweets over ten months to understand public opinion on gender-based violence, revealing insights into tweeting behaviors and informing intervention strategies.

Contribution

It demonstrates the application of computational social science to analyze large-scale social media data for insights on GBV attitudes and intervention opportunities.

Findings

Public awareness of GBV tolerance varies geographically and culturally.

Twitter data reflects transient events influencing GBV discourse.

Insights can inform policy and intervention effectiveness.

Abstract

Public institutions are increasingly reliant on data from social media sites to measure public attitude and provide timely public engagement. Such reliance includes the exploration of public views on important social issues such as gender-based violence (GBV). In this study, we examine big (social) data consisting of nearly fourteen million tweets collected from Twitter over a period of ten months to analyze public opinion regarding GBV, highlighting the nature of tweeting practices by geographical location and gender. We demonstrate the utility of Computational Social Science to mine insight from the corpus while accounting for the influence of both transient events and sociocultural factors. We reveal public awareness regarding GBV tolerance and suggest opportunities for intervention and the measurement of intervention effectiveness assisting both governmental and non-governmental organizations in policy development.