There Have Been 125 Million Tweets About Feminism And Equality Over The Past Three Years
There have been 125 million Tweets globally about feminism and equality over the past three years. As for the MENA region, a new survey that Twitter conducted with women on the platform based in GCC, Egypt and Lebanon revealed that 80% of them come to the platform to see what’s happening in the world. 54% of Arab women who use the platform stated that Twitter empowers them to express themselves freely, whereas 50% of them mentioned that Twitter allows them to connect with their interests and passions. Their interests include culture (53%), health (42% – which is likely driven by the recent Covid-19 outbreak), education (40%) and government (36%).
Last year’s Twitter data also revealed that the top Arabic women-related hashtags that were Tweeted in the region were اليوم_العالمي_للمراه# in Saudi Arabia, يوم_المرأة_الإماراتية# in the UAE and يوم_الام# in Egypt, which reflects the keenness of our audience in using the platform as a means to showcase and celebrate the achievements of women in the region.
On the occasion of International Women’s Day, Twitter has created two hashtag triggered emojis in Arabic and English among other languages. The first depicts the female symbol in gold and renders when Tweeting the following hashtags:
#IWD2020, #InternationalWomensDay, #IWD, #WomensDay, #SheInspiresMe, يوم_المرأة_العالمي#, يوم_المرأة#, هي_تلهمني#
Twitter will kick off a #SheInspiresMe campaign today, to inviting everyone in the region to join the global conversation about International Women’s Day. The @TwitterMENA account will encourage people to Tweet about women who have inspired them throughout their personal and professional journeys. The Tweets and conversations are intended to serve as a microphone for women’s voices by highlighting their power on the service.
The second emoji that Twitter has launched includes three female symbols in blue, green and purple. It gets unlocked when Tweeting #EveryWoman and كل_امرأة#. The campaign behind this emoji aims to advance the intersectional inclusion of women at Twitter, in the tech space and the global female community. The campaign is being run through @TwitterWomen, Twitter’s business resource group whose mission is to foster gender equality and support the inclusion and advancement of women at Twitter and in the tech industry.
Twitter’s focus on the health of public conversation has led to a number of improvements to its processes to protect all voices, including women’s. At the end of 2019, it continued its work to proactively reduce abuse on the platform, improving its machine-learning models to detect potential policy violations and sending more flagged Tweets to agents for review. This has resulted in Twitter taking down more abusive content, more proactively and faster than before, with a 27% decline in bystander reports on Tweets that violate its terms of service. From a product perspective, Twitter has given people more control over their conversations by allowing them to choose to hide replies to their Tweets. Everyone can see and engage with hidden replies by selecting an icon on the Tweet.