For many women, especially journalists, politicians, and other public figures, Twitter is something to endure. Many have accounts out of professional necessity, but the cost of their participation in Twitter discourse is often attacks, threats, and harassment. Women learn to block, mute, report, and ignore their mentions. Some tweet directly at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, frustrated that he seems never to take the problem of abuse against women on the site seriously. He rarely answers them directly.

Amnesty International considers such online abuse against women a human rights issue, and has repeatedly called on Twitter to release “meaningful information about reports of violence and abuse against women, as well as other groups, on the platform, and how they respond to it.” Twitter refused. So, Amnesty took matters into its own hands. On Tuesday, it launches an interactive website detailing the results of a crowdsourced study into harassment against women on Twitter, which it undertook in partnership with Element AI, an artificial intelligence company.

“We have built the world’s largest crowdsourced data set about online abuse against women,” Milena Marin, senior adviser for tactical research at Amnesty International, said in a statement. “We have the data to back up what women have long been telling us—that Twitter is a place where racism, misogyny and homophobia are allowed to flourish basically unchecked.”

The study looked at 778 women journalists and politicians in the US and UK, and found that 7.1 percent of tweets sent to them last year were abusive or problematic. The journalists and politicians received abuse at similar rates, and women were targeted on both the right and the left. Women of color in the study were 34 percent more likely to be the targets of harassment than white women. Black women were targeted most of all: One in every 10 tweets sent to them was abusive or problematic, whereas for white women it was one in 15.

“We found that, although abuse is targeted at women across the political spectrum, women of color were much more likely to be impacted and black women are disproportionately targeted. Twitter’s failure to crack down on this problem means it is contributing to the silencing of already marginalized voices,” according to Marin.

"Abuse, malicious automation, and manipulation detract from the health of Twitter," Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s legal, policy, and trust and safety lead, wrote in a response to Amnesty, which was provided to WIRED. "We are committed to holding ourselves publicly accountable toward progress in this regard."

“We have the data to back up what women have long been telling us—that Twitter is a place where racism, misogyny, and homophobia are allowed to flourish basically unchecked.” Milena Marin, Amnesty International

Amnesty’s Troll Patrol project relied on a combination of crowdsourcing and machine learning. More than 6,500 volunteers from 150 countries helped label a subset of 288,000 tweets (out of 14.5 million) that had been sent to the 778 women between January and December of 2017. The volunteers were trained to spot abusive tweets—tweets that promote violence against or threats to people based on their identification with a group, like race or gender, which violates Twitter’s TOS—and problematic tweets, which Amnesty defines as “hurtful or hostile content,” like negative stereotyping, that does “not necessarily meet the threshold of abuse.” Three experts also analyzed a smaller sample of 1,000 tweets.

Element AI then used the expert and crowdsourced data to extrapolate how much abuse the 778 women faced on Twitter overall. Their model estimated that of the 14.5 million tweets mentioning the women, 1.1 million were abusive or problematic. That’s a problematic or abusive tweet every 30 seconds.

The Troll Patrol's findings on race stand out most. Of the 778 journalists and politicians, black women were 84 percent more likely to be targets of abusive tweets than white women, and 60 percent more likely to receive problematic tweets. Asian women were the most likely to receive threats mentioning ethnic, racial, and religious slurs. Latinx women were slightly less likely to receive any abusive or problematic tweets than white women, but the abuse they received was 81 percent more likely to be physically and specifically threatening. (More details on the study's methodology are available online.)