More than Gender: Online Violence and Kenya´s 2022 Parliamentary Elections

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become key spaces for political communication. They provide women candidates the opportunity to bypass both media and party gatekeepers and the freedom to determine their messaging. Women candidates, however, also experience more abuse and harassment that is designed to silence and push them out the political sphere. The extent to which this abuse is driven by gender alone or by its intersection with other salient identities remains an empirical question. This paper examines how ethnicity, religion and marital status interact with gender to influence the kinds of online violence Kenyan candidates experience. The paper further seeks to understand how these digital spaces serve as spaces to police and negotiate both femininity and masculinity. By applying computational corpus-linguistic tools and methods to analyse the tweets (and their replies) made by Kenyan parliamentary candidates during the recent 2022 elections, the paper finds that women face abuse and harassment based on their compliance with religious standards and their marital status. Men candidates who face abuse tend to have their masculinity challenged. They are depicted as lacking autonomy, a key feature of sexist ideologies, because they are puppets of more powerful patrons.