Perpetuating Online Sexism Offline

The article investigates the study performed on sexism's presence online and how it influences sexism offline. The study was based on the social networking site, Twitter, and several study subjects. the purpose of the experiment was to determine if people who wrote sexist tweets would (a) demonstrate more sexist attitudes, (b) judge female candidates to be less competent, and (c) rate female candidates as less hirable than participants who retweeted sexist messages. Based on the results, it was seen that people who are anonymous are way more hostile when tweeting sexist tweets than people who are identified. People who wrote sexists tweets were also determined to be more hostile than people who retweeted them. It was also found that participants who wrote sexist tweets also judged female candidates as less competent. The study results proved that social media, especially anonymous social media, allow people to become more hostile toward sexism online and off. Sexist hashtags that spread on twitter are exposed to people all over, giving them the impression that sexist jokes are acceptable and will receive a lot of popularity on the site. I was expecting that people who tweeted from anonymous accounts were most hostile than those who identity was revealed. This is because of new social media apps such as Yik Yak, present on college campuses. This is essentially an anonymous twitter. People post ridiculous posts on Yik Yak, ones that they would never post if people knew their identity. Many of these posts are insulting and many are sexist as well. Social media is destructive in general and allow people to post, anonymous or not, offensive comments because of the lack of person to person facial expressions and face to face responses from other people. The security of being alone in one's room separated from other viewers makes people far bolder and more inclined to post offensively.