Abstract
Public engagement is a gendered experience, whether offline or online, something which is reflected in women’s experiences of social media. In this article, we seek to systematically explore the experiences from politically engaged women Twitter users in New Zealand in order to draw some lessons, through a thematic and interpretative analytical approach, at four different strategic levels on how to deflect intimidating and aggressive behaviour. We conclude that understanding strategically how structural social locations like gender effect the ability to contribute to political participation and engagement, if addressed, can produce more inclusive and productive online political and policy spaces. Further, this strategic approach involves connecting together different levels of response to online negativity such as platform tools, space-curation, and monitoring, having these made coherent with each other, as well as with this strategic understanding of how structural social location plays into access and use of online political and policy spaces.
Highlights
It presents a qualitative case study based on interview data with women Twitter users of how politically active women engage with a gendered online world, and how they develop certain defensive strategies in their use of social media platforms
\e article will primarily look to how the women in this case study managed participating in politics in digital spaces with the negativity they experienced there, and how they perceived it structurally as gendered. \e research question for this paper is in the lessons learned in systematically exploring the experiences of political engagement from women twitter users in New Zealand on how to deflect structural intimidating and aggressive behaviour at four different strategic levels
\e participants, and target population, for this research had the following characteristics/sampling-constraints: they identified themselves as women, they permanently resided in New Zealand, and were active Twitter users. \is sample tried to fill the empirical gap in systemic research
Summary
Approaches to dealing with online harassment tend to place the onus on the individual to combat negativity, when the issue is systemic and structural. To ensure effective and productive engagement, those creating and managing online political and policy spaces need to take strategic efforts to ensure those in social locations of less power, like women, can be fully participatory and contributory. Dr Sarah Hendrica Bickerton is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Public Policy Institute at the University of Auckland. Her current research interests include online social behaviour and the use of technology, online politics, technology and social media policy and regulation, feminist research and gender analysis, and gender mainstreaming in public sector budgets (ORCID: 0000-0003-2611-2214). Current research interests include electronic government and service delivery, democratic audit of new forms of local democracy, utilisation of knowledge in policy, and policy implementation/organisational changes/reforms in public sector organisations (ORCID: 0000-0002-9303-0895)
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