Tag: Twitter

3 Reasons Why We Need Critical Feminist Theory More Than Ever in the Age of Big Data

by Inga Helgudóttir Ingulfsen

8 NOV 2017

This post is a follow-up to Helgudóttir Ingulfsen’s paper “#RefugeesNotWelcome: Making Gendered Sense of Transnational Asylum Politics on Twitter”, which was published in the Rapoport Center’s Working Paper Series in 2016 (available here). That paper was also the winner of the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2016), and was responded to by Courtney McGinn and Reina Wehbi in the piece “Are Refugees Really Not Welcome?“

In the age of Big Data­­—when Silicon Valley “tech bros” are busy convincing us of the merits of machine learning, and the US president pretends to govern while flirting with his white supremacists followers on Twitter—I make the case for why we need critical feminist scholarship now more than ever.

  1. Gender is at the Core of Xenophobic and Nationalistic Discourses

In December 2015, I was in my third semester of graduate school at New York University. Concerned about the rising tide of xenophobia (little did I know how much worse it would get), I wanted to look at online discourses about immigration and was interested in applying a feminist lens to the research. I typed #Refugees and #RefugeesNotWelcome in the search bar on Twitter and what I discovered was so dense with explicit sexist and misogynistic imagery and language that a few months later it amounted to a 120 page thesis.

My dataset revealed conversations littered with images of young white women covered in blood – supposed European victims of rape perpetrated by male immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. Twitter users from the US, Europe, and Japan alike portrayed the flow of refugees crossing the Mediterranean to Europe as a carefully calculated Muslim invasion of Europe, threatening to destroy Western civilization. The Twitter users employed powerful gendered language and imagery to construct a binary opposition between ‘Us’ – the White, Western, Enlightened community – and ‘Them’ – refugees, particularly Muslim refugees, construed as threats to the racial and cultural preservation and physical safety of the Western community.

Ironically, Enlightenment ideas – civil and political rights, feminism, freedom of speech – were used to justify fundamentally illiberal immigration and integration policies. The appropriation of feminist ideas was a prevalent strategy among the Twitter users I studied. These strategies are fraught with contradictions. The Twitter users call for the protection of both Western and Muslim women against the supposed violent nature of Muslim men, while consistently attacking what they see as hypocritical liberal and multicultural feminists, framed as naïve traitors of the Enlightened White community. The below meme from my dataset is one example of this strategy, accompanied by the following tweet: “RT@……….: The perks of multiculturalism #refugeesnotwelcome”.

(Image 8: Dataset 2 tweet 120)

  1. Feminist Research as a Tool to Understand and Combat Xenophobia

The realization that gender is instrumentalized in nationalistic and xenophpobic narratives is not new. Feminist scholars like Cynthia Enloe and Nira Yuval-Davis have been arguing as much since the 1980s. However, feminist studies of gender and nationalism have tended to be primarily based on interpretation of elite discourses or political statements. The vast amount of data produced by the billions of social media users around the world represents a new opportunity to develop more rigorous and empirically driven feminist studies of xenophobia. Social media are not just accessible pools of data that can be sampled for quantitative studies of social interactions; they are just as interesting for the richness and detail of the data produced by their users. Images, memes, and videos are combined with text commentary, providing detailed insight into how an individual user constructs a narrative and the types of visual and rhetorical tools employed to support that narrative. Knowing whether hashtags like #RefugeesNotWelomce, #Rapefugees or #WhiteGenocide are trending is not as valuable as understanding how each user justifies a narrative that frames male Muslim refugees as violent or racially inferior. If we want to combat xenophobia we have to understand what makes xenophobic narratives powerful and why they resonate with particular groups of people. Rather than counting hashtag use and “likes,” we need to delve into the stories behind the hashtags. Feminist discourse analysis is a powerful tool to do just that because gender binaries are key organizing principles behind these stories.

  1. Feminist Scrutiny of Algorithms: Exposing Patriarchal Bias in the Big Data Universe

My study, published in 2016, highlights why we should be careful to mine Facebook and Twitter to study public sentiment: social media users differ from the general population in multiple ways, and the algorithms that structure information on social media are built to generate profit rather than organic conversations and interactions. Returning to the topic now, I see that my study failed to explore in detail a critical component of algorithmic bias – the ways in which gender and race biases are themselves integral to the structure of online information and interactions. Scientists have revealed how “machine learning algorithms are picking up deeply ingrained race and gender prejudices concealed within the patterns of language use.” The data that is used to train algorithms is after all generated by humans. One study found algorithms have adopted implicit biases commonly detected in psychology experiments: “[t]he words “female” and “woman” were more closely associated with arts and humanities occupations and with the home, while “male” and “man” were closer to math and engineering professions.” How might for example, Twitter’s algorithms have learned these types of implicit gender biases and how could those in turn be helping to make certain (gendered and racialized) content more prominent?

Phrases like artificial intelligence, Big Data, and machine learning give off a false aura of objectivity that can lead to fatal misrepresentations and uses of the data generated by social media users. I have witnessed first-hand how policy-makers can be seduced by Big Data’s false promise of objectivity. Participating in a meeting on Big Data and evaluation hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation and attended by UN evaluation officers and data scientists, algorithmic bias was not adequately addressed and Twitter was presented as a promising source of information on public sentiment. UN Global Pulse – the UN’s Big Data Initiative – was the main proponent, and several of their projects make use of social media data for perception studies. Presenting my findings to the data and research team at UN Women, I warned of the algorithmic biases in social media data and argued for extreme caution in using Twitter data to track public sentiment or perceptions on gender.

Feminist scholars would make ideal methodological foot soldiers in the battle to discount false narratives of Big Data objectivity, as feminist epistemology is inherently critical and skeptical of any tradition that lays claim to objective truth. We need more strong feminist voices like Soraya Chemaly to counter the corporate spin of Silicon Valley “tech bros.” We should ramp up investments in initiatives like the Women’s Media Center’s Speech project and the Algorithmic Justice League to begin to construct a more just and inclusive internet.

Inga H. Ingulfsen is a Research Analyst in Global Partnerships, at Foundation Center and graduated from NYU’s Center for Global Affairs in May 2016 with an MS in Global Affairs, specializing in gender, immigration and peacebuilding.

“Are Refugees Really Not Welcome?”

by Courtney McGinn and Reina Wehbi

2 MAR 2017

“#RefugeesNotWelcome: Making Gendered Sense of Transnational Asylum Politics on Twitter” by Inga Ingulfsen is the winning paper of the 2016 Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights, an interdisciplinary writing competition organized by the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. In 2017, Ingulfsen wrote a follow-up article to #RefugeesNotWelcome  addressing why critical feminist scholarship is now more important than ever.

In this piece, Ingulfsen creatively uses new methodologies to explore the “contentious landscape of asylum politics” by analyzing the gendered discourses used by Twitter users who tweet with the hashtag #refugeesnotwelcome. In doing so, Ingulfsen unveiled that Twitter users justify refugee exclusion by imaging themselves as a “White Western Enlightened community” in binary opposition to refugees, who are deemed threats to their community. This process of binary construction is inherently gendered due to the fact that refugees (specifically Muslim refugees) are often depicted as barbaric, violent men who frequently objectify, abuse, and oppress women.

In the beginning, Ingulfsen gives insights into the evolution of contemporary asylum politics through history, statistics and a comparison of attitudes of different western communities towards asylum and immigration. She also showcases the increasing challenges faced by both refugees and asylum regimes who are sometimes unable to accommodate the large influx of migrants.

Since Twitter today serves as a platform for the “global flow of real-time reactions and opinions” worldwide, Ingulfsen sheds the light on users’ different patterns of behavior. She describes the mainstream pattern as “unequal participation” because the majority of the content on Twitter is produced by a small group of opinion makers who shape the public discourse. The majority of Twitter users disseminate the material through “re-tweeting” what that small group of opinion leaders have to say. Throughout her argument, Ingulfsen reflects on the impact of such a course of online activity on the refugee crisis.

Ingulfsen then explores the gendered discursive strategies employed by Twitter users who ‘imagine’ refugees as ‘not welcome.’ Her research methodology focuses on analyzing English-language tweets with the hashtag #refugeesnotwelcome, guiding the reader into the steps of her analysis process. To explain her findings, Ingulfsen presents a set of tweets that perceive the Muslim migrants as culturally different, barbaric, and oppressive; thus justifying their exclusion. In the end, Ingulfsen stresses on the importance of deconstructing anti-immigrant rhetoric.

This piece comes at a very troublesome time for refugees and immigration in general. Recently, President Trump signed an executive order to keep refugees and immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim nations out of the United States for a specified period of time. Refugees and immigrants were banned from entering the country for 120 days. The countries affected are Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia. Even more daunting is the fact that the White House Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, said more countries could be added to Trump’s order in the future.

Although green card holders and individuals with valid visas were supposed to be excluded from the ban, that was not what actually played out. As reported by CNN, some travelers who were in the air when Trump signed the order were not able to enter the country when they landed. Some were detained and others were sent back to the country of origin. The confusion of who was included or excluded from the travel ban came from the fact that career homeland security staff were only allowed to see the final details of the order on the day it was signed by Trump. In the following days, airports struggled to adjust to the new directive. [1]

Although presidents have broad power in shaping immigration policy, many deem this executive order as unconstitutional based on its discriminatory nature. On its face, the order does not discriminate on the basis of religion or even mention Muslims. The Supreme Court of the United States has held that a facially neutral law may still be deemed unconstitutional based on the discriminatory intent of that law. In regards to Trump’s intent, Professor Corey Brettschnieder from Brown University stated the following:

[A] closer look at the executive order’s origins makes clear that it is a direct assault on the fundamental constitutional values of equal protection and religious freedom. How do we know this? Because Trump’s adviser, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, told us so.

Interviewed on Fox News on January 28, Giuliani explained how the administration’s immigration policy morphed from one that was obviously unconstitutional to one that is more subtly so. Host Jeanine Pirro asked, “Does the ban have anything to do with religion?” In response, Giuliani said, “When [Trump] first announced it, he said ‘Muslim ban.’ He called me up, he said, ‘Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.’” “It,” in this case, of course, is a ban on Muslims. Giuliani’s admission is a textbook case of drafting an order in a way that avoids overt declaration of animus against a religious or ethnic group, while retaining the motive and much of the effect.[2]

Similarly, lower courts have already shown their resistance. In New York, a federal judge granted an emergency stay for citizens of the countries included in the ban and ruled they cannot be removed from the U.S. Similarly, in Boston, federal judges ruled officials cannot detain a person on the basis of Trump’s executive order.[3] In Washington, a federal court issued a stay, which stopped detained travelers from being sent back to their home country. After the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments over whether to lift the temporary halt to the travel ban, the three judge panel unanimously held that the travel ban will remained blocked.[4] Although there has been great opposition to the Trump Administration’s actions thus far, things look far from over. On February 9, 2017, in response to the 9th Circuit’s decision, Trump took to Twitter per usual, stating, “SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!” Trump is expected to issue a replacement order in the near future.

Instigated by anti-immigration xenophobic rhetoric, hundreds of cases of hateful harassment or intimidation have been reported during the month after election day.[5] Hate speech and bias-related incidents took place on streets, schools and groceries.[6] According to CNN, overall reported hate crime rate spiked 6% since the elections. However, the actual rate could be higher since the majority of incidents go unreported.[7]

Due to today’s current issues, Ingulfsen’s emphasis on the importance of deconstructing anti-immigrant rhetoric could not be more appropriate. Inga Ingulfsen’s presented her research to the data and research team at UN Women. You can view the complete published paper here.

Courtney McGinn is an LLM student at Texas Law, concentrating in Human Rights and Comparative Constitutional Law, and member of the 2016-2017 Working Paper Series Editorial Committee.

Reina Wehbi is a Fulbright grantee from Lebanon currently pursuing her LL.M in Human Rights and Comparative Constitutional Law at the University of Texas at Austin. She graduated with an LL.B from the Lebanese University in Beirut.