Digital Gender-Based Violence Against Women in Chilean Subnational elections: Patterns and Impacts

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-868-4_25How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Digital Gender Based Political Violence; Local and Regional Elections; computational methods; Chile

Abstract

Despite growing global awareness of online violence against women in politics, empirical research on its prevalence, forms, and consequences in Latin America remains scarce, particularly in the local and regional political level. This study examines digital gender-based political violence (DGPV) against women candidates during Chile’s 2024 local and regional elections, analyzing 958,720 posts from Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram. Computational methods, including web scraping and manual data extraction (NodeXL)—were used to map abusive discourse. Results show that 21.51% of “X” interactions contained violent content, compared to 4.97% on Instagram and 3.22% on Facebook, with mayoral and gubernatorial candidates disproportionately targeted. Violence primarily involved reputational attacks (47%), gendered hate speech (48%), and disinformation (42), often weaponizing candidates’ political stances or gender. Platform-specific dynamics emerged: X’s anonymity facilitated direct threats, while Facebook’s threaded discussions enabled sustained harassment. Notably, algorithmic amplification exacerbated attacks on high-visibility figures, revealing platform governance gaps. The study highlights how DGPV replicates offline power asymmetries in digital spaces, suppressing women’s political participation. It proposes computational social science methodologies to detect platform-specific abuse patterns, advocating for sociotechnical interventions in content moderation and candidate protection protocols.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - René Jara Reyes
AU  - Jarnishs Beltrán
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/10/22
TI  - Digital Gender-Based Violence Against Women in Chilean Subnational elections: Patterns and Impacts
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Communication and Applied Technologies 2025 (ICOMTA 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 266
EP  - 276
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-868-4_25
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-868-4_25
ID  - Reyes2025
ER  -