Election bot deployed in New Zealand to fight online sexism
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The 2020 New Zealand general elections are slated to take place on Saturday, October 17. This will determine the leadership of the 53rd New Zealand Parliament.
But the country is battling a problem rampant across the globe: harassment of women. This becomes peculiar in New Zealand, where the election is being fought among two women - the incumbent Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, along with Judith Collins, her main opposition.
The country has come up with a new solution: an abuse-fighting bot! In a bid to tackle harassment of female candidates in the country, the bot is sending out positive messages across social media platforms in the country.
Along with the two major candidates, more than 260 parliamentary candidates have become a target for sexism and harassment online.
Owing to this precarious situation, the country launched the “Parity Bot”, which was also used in Canadian elections last year. For every negative and abusive tweet against female candidates, the bot sends out a positive message.
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"A whole bunch of studies out there show women candidates get exponentially more toxic tweets than men, which is why we have created this for women," Jacqueline Comer, a creative technologist for the bot, told Reuters.
"It is not to say that men don't suffer from this, but it is a bigger problem for women," she further said.
The bot has analysed over 95,000 tweets and found over 1,800 abusive tweets, with most directed at Ardern and Collins.
The messages sent out by the bot read something like this - "great women like you running to make NZ a better place".
New Zealand was the world’s first nation to give voting rights to women in 1893.