Gendered and Racialized Online Incivility in Four Dimensions

Candidates for political office frequently face online incivility and abuse. Research consistently finds that incivility and abuse can hinder the full political participation for women, and especially racialized women. However, there are competing theories and contradictory findings about precisely how gender and race shape online incivility. Much research focuses on how gender and race affect the volume of uncivil messages. This chapter extends that work to highlight other crucial dimensions of online incivility. We propose a framework to encompass all relevant characteristics of online incivility, which include: (1) frequency of incivility, (2) qualitative forms, (3) targeting and distribution, and (4) interaction with offline discrimination and threats. This emerged from an analysis of 969,308 tweets from the 2019 Canadian election and in-depth interviews with 31 candidates and campaign staff. We show that while candidates’ gender and race do not necessarily predict the volume of online incivility, women and racialized candidates do face more misogynist and racialized incivility. We also find some misogynist and racist content is directed at prominent male and/or white candidates’ accounts in apparent efforts to disseminate these discourses more broadly. Finally, given the realities of online abuse in Canada, this chapter suggests how to better support candidates and politicians.