Online Violence Against Women in Politics: Evidence from Türkiye and the United States

Date: January 14, 2026

Time: 12:00

Location: Zoom

Summary

This study, the findings of which will be presented, is a multi-authored collaborative research project conducted in 2024 in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh Ford Institute for Human Security and Koç University’s Computational Social Sciences Center. Adopting a comparative perspective, the research examines online violence directed at women candidates in politics by focusing on the volume, intensity, and types of social media–based violence targeting women who ran for parliamentary and mayoral offices in the 2023 Turkish general elections, the 2024 local elections, and the 2024 U.S. general elections. The presentation will detail the working principles of artificial intelligence models developed through large-scale social media data analysis that are capable of detecting and classifying violent language. In addition, it will discuss how the methodology of this academic research has informed and been adapted for an ongoing project in Northern Ireland aimed at identifying online violence against women within the general population.