Gender inequality on Twitter during the UK election of 2019

Abstract

Social media platforms such as Twitter play an essential role in politics and social movements nowadays. The aim of this paper is to compare and contrast the language used on Twitter to refer to the candidates of the last UK general election of December 2019 in order to raise awareness of gender inequality in politics. The methodology followed is based on three aspects: (a) a quantitative analysis using Sketch Engine to extract the main collocates from the corpus; (b) a sentiment analysis of the compiled tweets by means of two lexicon classifications: BING (Hu & Liu, 2004) and NRC (Mohammad & Turney, 2013), which classifies words into eight basic emotions and two sentiments (positive and negative); and (c) a qualitative analysis employing a Critical Discourse Analysis approach (Fairclough, 2013) to examine verbal abuse towards women from a linguistics perspective.