Gendered election violence on Facebook: Online experiences of political candidates in Tunisia

There has been a rapid increase in the use of social media during election campaigns around the world, but research on how political candidates in transition contexts experience its negative consequences is still scarce. This paper explores the online election violence that political candidates were targeted with during the 2019 parliamentary election campaign in Tunisia, with a specific focus on the gendered patterns in its frequency, form and impact. Tunisia is a new democracy where women are relatively well represented in parliament (31% before the 2019 elections). In relation to other countries with a similar level of development, the access to the Internet and use of social media in Tunisia is also relatively high (68%). The study builds two types of data: first we have collected over 14,000 comments from the public Facebook profiles of a strategic selection of nearly 100 Tunisian men and women candidates (winners as well as losers) during the official election period. This data has been manually coded to identify a range of negative comments, from which we have distinguished general uncivil online behavior on the one hand, and online election violence on the other hand. To further explore the gendered experiences of online election violence, we have carried out interviews with 20 men and women candidates who ran in the 2019 elections. We find no clear gendered patterns in who is targeted with uncivil comments or online election violence, but we find that more visible candidates (incumbents) with a larger online presence are targeted to a much larger extent than other candidates. The results also point to a possible escalation, whereby candidates who receive more negative comments in general are also more likely to receive comments that cross the line of being categorized as violent. The interviews corroborate the statistical analysis of Facebook comments, and in addition provide an increased understanding of the gendered forms and impact of online election violence: while more visible candidates were more likely to experience online attacks during the election period, women and men’s experiences of the online election violence they were targeted with differed to some extent. In particular, despite the fact that women did not receive more comments with sexual content than men did, they perceived that they were more targeted with sexualized imagery and degrading talk as well as more severely affected by these types of online interactions. Future studies should therefore look more closely at these more subtle gendered impacts that risk being overlooked if we only focus on the frequency and form of online attacks. It should also probe further into how candidate visibility is related to an escalation of online violence during elections campaigns.