Women, politics and Twitter: Using machine learning to change the discourse

Abstract: Including diverse voices in political decision-making strengthens our democratic institutions. Within the Canadian political system, there is gender inequality across all levels of elected government. Online abuse, such as hateful tweets, leveled at women engaged in politics contributes to this inequity, particularly tweets focusing on their gender. In this paper, we present ParityBOT: a Twitter bot which counters abusive tweets aimed at women in politics by sending supportive tweets about influential female leaders and facts about women in public life. ParityBOT is the first artificial intelligence-based intervention aimed at affecting online discourse for women in politics for the better. The goal of this project is to: $1$) raise awareness of issues relating to gender inequity in politics, and $2$) positively influence public discourse in politics. The main contribution of this paper is a scalable model to classify and respond to hateful tweets with quantitative and qualitative assessments. The ParityBOT abusive classification system was validated on public online harassment datasets. We conclude with analysis of the impact of ParityBOT, drawing from data gathered during interventions in both the $2019$ Alberta provincial and $2019$ Canadian federal elections.

Our political systems are unequal, and we suffer for it. Diversity in representation around decision-making tables is important for the health of our democratic institutions BIBREF0. One example of this inequity of representation is the gender disparity in politics: there are fewer women in politics than men, largely because women do not run for office at the same rate as men. This is because women face systemic barriers in political systems across the world BIBREF1. One of these barriers is online harassment BIBREF2, BIBREF3. Twitter is an important social media platform for politicians to share their visions and engage with their constituents. Women are disproportionately harassed on this platform because of their gender BIBREF4.
To raise awareness of online abuse and shift the discourse surrounding women in politics, we designed, built, and deployed ParityBOT: a Twitter bot that classifies hateful tweets directed at women in politics and then posts “positivitweets”. This paper focuses on how ParityBOT improves discourse in politics.
Previous work that addressed online harassment focused on collecting tweets directed at women engaged in politics and journalism and determining if they were problematic or abusive BIBREF5, BIBREF3, BIBREF6. Inspired by these projects, we go one step further and develop a tool that directly engages in the discourse on Twitter in political communities. Our hypothesis is that by seeing “positivitweets” from ParityBOT in their Twitter feeds, knowing that each tweet is an anonymous response to a hateful tweet, women in politics will feel encouraged and included in digital political communitiesBIBREF7. This will reduce the barrier to fair engagement on Twitter for women in politics. It will also help achieve gender balance in Canadian politics and improve gender equality in our society.
In this section, we outline the technical details of ParityBot. The system consists of: 1) a Twitter listener that collects and classifies tweets directed at a known list of women candidates, and 2) a responder that sends out positivitweets when hateful tweets are detected.
We collect tweets from Twitter's real-time streaming API. The stream listener uses the open-source Python library Tweepy BIBREF8. The listener analyses tweets in real-time by firing an asynchronous tweet analysis and storage function for each English tweet mentioning one or more candidate usernames of interest. We limit the streaming to English as our text analysis models are trained on English language corpora. We do not track or store retweets to avoid biasing the analysis by counting the same content multiple times. Twitter data is collected and used in accordance with the acceptable terms of use BIBREF9.
The tweet analysis and storage function acts as follows: 1) parsing the tweet information to clean and extract the tweet text, 2) scoring the tweet using multiple text analysis models, and 3) storing the data in a database table. We clean tweet text with a variety of rules to ensure that the tweets are cleaned consistent with the expectations of the analysis models (see Appdx SECREF9).
The text analysis models classify a tweet by using, as features, the outputs from Perspective API from Jigsaw BIBREF10, HateSonar BIBREF11, and VADER sentiment models BIBREF12. Perspective API uses machine learning models to score the perceived impact a tweet might have BIBREF10. The outputs from these models (i.e. 17 from Perspective, 3 from HateSonar, and 4 from VADER) are combined into a single feature vector for each tweet (see Appdx SECREF10). No user features are included in the tweet analysis models. While these features may improve classification accuracy they can also lead to potential bias BIBREF13.
We measure the relative correlation of each feature with the hateful or not hateful labels. We found that Perspective API's TOXICITY probability was the most consistently predictive feature for classifying hateful tweets. Fig. FIGREF5 shows the relative frequencies of hateful and non-hateful tweets over TOXICITY scores. During both elections, we opted to use a single Perspective API feature to trigger sending positivitweets. Using the single TOXICITY feature is almost as predictive as using all features and a more complex model SECREF14. It was also simpler to implement and process tweets at scale. The TOXICITY feature is the only output from the Perspective API with transparent evaluation details summarized in a Model Card BIBREF14, BIBREF15.
Deploying ParityBOT during the Alberta 2019 election required volunteers to use online resources to create a database of all the candidates running in the Alberta provincial election. Volunteers recorded each candidate's self-identifying gender and Twitter handle in this database. For the 2019 federal Canadian election, we scraped a Wikipedia page that lists candidates BIBREF16. We used the Python library gender-guesser BIBREF17 to predict the gender of each candidate based on their first names. As much as possible, we manually validated these predictions with corroborating evidence found in candidates' biographies on their party's websites and in their online presence.
ParityBOT sent positivitweets composed by volunteers. These tweets expressed encouragement, stated facts about women in politics, and aimed to inspire and uplift the community. Volunteers submitted many of these positivitweets through an online form. Volunteers were not screened and anyone could access the positivitweet submission form. However, we mitigate the impact of trolls submitting hateful content, submitter bias, and ill-equipped submitters by reviewing, copy editing, and fact checking each tweet. Asking for community contribution in this way served to maximize limited copywriting resources and engage the community in the project.
We evaluated the social impact of our system by interviewing individuals involved in government ($n=5$). We designed a discussion guide based on user experience research interview standards to speak with politicians in relevant jurisdictions BIBREF18. Participants had varying levels of prior awareness of the ParityBOT project. Our participants included 3 women candidates, each from a different major political party in the 2019 Alberta provincial election, and 2 men candidates at different levels of government representing Alberta areas. The full discussion guide for qualitative assessment is included in Appdx SECREF27. All participants provided informed consent to their anonymous feedback being included in this paper.
We deployed ParityBOT during two elections: 1) the 2019 Alberta provincial election, and 2) the 2019 Canadian federal election. For each tweet we collected, we calculated the probability that the tweet was hateful or abusive. If the probability was higher than our response decision threshold, a positivitweet was posted. Comprehensive quantitative results are listed in Appendix SECREF6.
During the Alberta election, we initially set the decision threshold to a TOXICITY score above $0.5$ to capture the majority of hateful tweets, but we were sending too many tweets given the number of positivitweets we had in our library and the Twitter API daily limit BIBREF9. Thus, after the first 24 hours that ParityBOT was live, we increased the decision threshold to $0.8$, representing a significant inflection point for hatefulness in the training data (Fig. FIGREF5). We further increased the decision threshold to $0.9$ for the Canadian federal election given the increase in the number and rate of tweets processed. For the Alberta provincial election, the model classified 1468 tweets of the total 12726 as hateful, and posted only 973 positivitweets. This means that we did not send out a positivitweet for every classified hateful tweet, and reflects our decision rate-limit of ParityBOT. Similar results were found for the 2019 Canadian election.
We wrote guidelines and values for this to guide the ongoing development of the ParityBOT project. These values help us make decision and maintain focus on the goal of this project.
While there is potential to misclassify tweets, the repercussions of doing so are limited. With ParityBOT, false negatives, hateful tweets classified as non-hateful, are not necessarily bad, since the bot is tweeting a positive message. False positives, non-hateful tweets classified as hateful, may result in tweeting too frequently, but this is mitigated by our choice of decision threshold.
In developing ParityBOT, we discussed the risks of using bots on social media and in politics. First, we included the word “bot” in the project title and Twitter handle to be clear that the Twitter account was tweeting automatically. We avoided automating any direct “at (@) mention” of Twitter users, only identifying individuals' Twitter handles manually when they had requested credit for their submitted positivitweet. We also acknowledge that we are limited in achieving certainty in assigning a gender to each candidate.
In our qualitative research, we discovered that ParityBOT played a role in changing the discourse. One participant said, “it did send a message in this election that there were people watching” (P2). We consistently heard that negative online comments are a fact of public life, even to the point where it's a signal of growing influence. “When you're being effective, a good advocate, making good points, people are connecting with what you're saying. The downside is, it comes with a whole lot more negativity [...] I can always tell when a tweet has been effective because I notice I'm followed by trolls” (P1).
We heard politicians say that the way they have coped with online abuse is to ignore it. One participant explained, “I've tried to not read it because it's not fun to read horrible things about yourself” (P4). Others dismiss the idea that social media is a useful space for constructive discourse: “Because of the diminishing trust in social media, I'm stopping going there for more of my intelligent discourse. I prefer to participate in group chats with people I know and trust and listen to podcasts” (P3).
We would like to run ParityBOT in more jurisdictions to expand the potential impact and feedback possibilities. In future iterations, the system might better match positive tweets to the specific type of negative tweet the bot is responding to. Qualitative analysis helps to support the interventions we explore in this paper. To that end, we plan to survey more women candidates to better understand how a tool like this impacts them. Additionally, we look forward to talking to more women interested in politics to better understand whether a tool like this would impact their decision to run for office. We would like to expand our hateful tweet classification validation study to include larger, more recent abusive tweet datasets BIBREF19, BIBREF20. We are also exploring plans to extend ParityBOT to invite dialogue: for example, asking people to actively engage with ParityBOT and analyse reply and comment tweet text using natural language-based discourse analysis methods.
During the 2019 Alberta provincial and 2019 Canadian federal elections, ParityBOT highlighted that hate speech is prevalent and difficult to combat on our social media platforms as they currently exist, and it is impacting democratic health and gender equality in our communities BIBREF21. We strategically designed ParityBOT to inject hope and positivity into politics, to encourage more diverse candidates to participate. By using machine learning technology to address these systemic issues, we can help change the discourse an link progress in science to progress in humanity.
We use regular expression rules to clean tweets: convert the text to lowercase, remove URLs, strip newlines, replace whitespace with a single space, and replace mentions with the text tag `MENTION'. While these rules may bias the classifiers, they allow for consistency and generalization between training, validation, and testing datasets.
Each tweet is processed by three models: Perspective API from Jigsaw BIBREF10, HateSonar BIBREF11, and VADER sentiment models BIBREF12. Each of these models outputs a score between $[0,1]$ which correlates the text of the tweet with the specific measure of the feature. The outputs from these models (i.e. 17 from Perspective, 3 from HateSonar, and 4 from VADER) are combined into a single feature vector for each tweet. Below we list the outputs for each text featurization model:
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Perspective API: 'IDENTITY_ATTACK', 'INCOHERENT', 'TOXICITY_FAST', 'THREAT', 'INSULT', 'LIKELY_TO_REJECT', 'TOXICITY', 'PROFANITY', 'SEXUALLY_EXPLICIT', 'ATTACK_ON_AUTHOR', 'SPAM', 'ATTACK_ON_COMMENTER', 'OBSCENE', 'SEVERE_TOXICITY', 'INFLAMMATORY'
HateSonar: 'sonar_hate_speech', 'sonar_offensive_language', 'sonar_neither'
VADER: 'vader_neg', 'vader_neu', 'vader_pos', 'vader_compound'
For validation, we found the most relevant features and set an abusive prediction threshold by using a dataset of 20194 cleaned, unique tweets identified as either hateful and not hateful from previous research BIBREF22. Each entry in our featurized dataset is composed of 24 features and a class label of hateful or not hateful. The dataset is shuffled and randomly split into training (80%) and testing (20%) sets matching the class balance ($25.4\%$ hateful) of the full dataset. We use Adaptive Synthetic (ADASYN) sampling to resample and balance class proportions in the dataset BIBREF23.
With the balanced training dataset, we found the best performing classifier to be a gradient boosted decision tree BIBREF24 by sweeping over a set of possible models and hyperparameters using TPOT BIBREF25. For this sweep, we used 10-fold cross validation on the training data. We randomly partition this training data 10 times, fit a model on a training fraction, and validate on the held-out set.
We performed an ablation experiment to test the relative impact of the features derived from the various text classification models.
This table includes quantitative results from the deployment of ParityBOT in the Alberta 2019 provincial and Canadian 2019 federal elections.
Overview Interviews will be completed in three rounds with three different target participant segments.
Research Objectives nolistsep
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Understand if and how the ParityBOT has impacted women in politics
Obtain feedback from Twitter users who've interacted with the bot
Explore potential opportunities to build on the existing idea and platform
Gain feedback and initial impressions from people who haven't interacted with the Bot, but are potential audience
Target Participants
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Round 1: Women in politics who are familiar with the Bot
Round 2: Women who've interacted with the Bot (maybe those we don't know)
Round 3: Some women who may be running in the federal election who haven't heard of the ParityBOT, but might benefit from following it
All participants: Must be involved in politics in Canada and must be engaged on Twitter - i.e. have an account and follow political accounts and/or issues
Recruiting
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Round 1: [Author] recruit from personal network via text
Round 2: Find people who've interacted with the bot on Twitter who we don't know, send them a DM, and ask if we can get their feedback over a 15- to 30-minute phone call
Round 3: Use contacts in Canadian politics to recruit participants who have no prior awareness of ParityBOT
Method 15- to 30-minute interviews via telephone
Output Summary of findings in the form of a word document that can be put into the paper
Introduction
[Author]: Hey! Thanks for doing this. This shouldn't take longer than 20 minutes. [Author] is a UX researcher and is working with us. They'll take it from here and explain our process, get your consent and conduct the interview. I'll be taking notes. Over to [Author]!
[Author]: Hi, my name is [Author], I'm working with [Author] and [Author] to get feedback on the ParityBOT; the Twitter Bot they created during the last provincial election.
With your permission, we'd like to record our conversation. The recording will only be used to help us capture notes from the session and figure out how to improve the project, and it won't be seen by anyone except the people working on this project. We may use some quotes in an academic paper, You'll be anonymous and we won't identify you personally by name.
If you have any concerns at time, we can stop the interview and the recording. Do we have your permission to do this? (Wait for verbal “yes”).
Round 1 (Women in Politics familiar with ParityBOT)
Background and Warm Up
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When you were thinking about running for politics what were your major considerations? For example, barriers, concerns?
We know that online harassment is an issue for women in politics - have you experienced this in your career? How do you deal with harassment? What are your coping strategies?
What advice would you give to women in politics experiencing online harassment?
Introduction to PartyBOT Thanks very much, now, more specifically about the ParityBOT:
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What do you know about the ParityBOT?
What do you think it's purpose is?
Did you encounter it? Tell me about how you first encountered it? Did it provide any value to you during your campaign? How? Do you think this is a useful tool? Why or why not? Did it mitigate the barrier of online harassment during your time as a politician?
Is there anything you don't like about the Bot?
Next Steps If you could build on this idea of mitigating online harassment for women in politics, what ideas or suggestions would you have?
Conclusion Any other thoughts or opinions about the ParityBOT you'd like to share before we end our call?
Thank you very much for your time! If you have any questions, or further comments, feel free to text or email [Author].

Figure and table captions:
Figure 1: Visualizing the training data distribution. Relative frequency of hateful versus not hateful tweets for varying levels of the Perspective API [17] TOXICITY score. Normalized histograms are plotted underneath kernel density estimation (KDE) plots.
Figure 2: 10-fold cross validation ablation experiment showing the relative impacts of including various feature sets (PERSPECTIVE [17], VADER [11], HATESONAR [8], from left to right) in the feature vectors on performance. Performance is measured using binary classification area under the receiver operated characteristic curve (ROC AUC) and averaged over the 10-folds. These methods are compared with the best performing classifier from the validation study, a gradient-boosted decision tree (textscLGBM [13], left) and a stratified RANDOM classifier (right).

Questions about this paper:
Where do the supportive tweets about women come from? Are they automatically or manually generated?

Answers:
Manualy (volunteers composed them)