When the Finnish Sanna Marin took office on December 10, 2019, information spread around the globe: at 34, the one who was until then Minister of Transport not only became the youngest Prime Minister of the world. She would also lead a coalition with four other parties, all led by women, including three under 35.
“The lipstick brigade”, “The feminist quintet”, “The Tampax team”… Yet, since then, these are the kinds of remarks most frequently used by Finnish Twitter users to characterize the government as Sanna Marin. To these sexist formulas, we must add the insults, personal attacks and hate speech used daily to harass the women ministers of the Marin government.
These are the sad conclusions of the report on “Coordinated online harassment of Finnish government ministers”, published by the NATO Center of Excellence for Strategic Communication (Stratcom) in Latvia based on a study carried out in 2020.
In view of previous studies on the subject, including that of Amnesty International in 2018, titled “Toxic Twitter”, which revealed the extent of attacks and toxicity suffered by women on the platform, this work would not have should not have surprised. And yet, when he presented the conclusions, on March 17, analyst Rolf Fredheim admitted that the level of offensive messages received by Finnish ministers was “Extremely high”.
“Insults, attempted intimidation, hatred”
For four months, from March 16 to July 27, 2020, a period including the first confinement and negotiations in Brussels on the European recovery plan, the Stratcom analyzed all the tweets sent to the twenty ministers of Sanna Marin’s government. Result: out of 350,000 messages, sent by just over 5,000 users, 7% were abusive. Among them, a third was addressed to Sanna Marin, which represents nearly 10% of the messages she received on Twitter.
His interior minister, leader of the League of Greens, Maria Ohisalo, 36, comes in second, with 18% of messages. “In a democracy, it is normal for a political figure to be the object of criticism, but hatred should not have its place ”, she judges, questioned by The world. And yet, with every step she took in her career, the harassment on social media intensified: “Insults, attempted intimidation, hatred… Anything you can imagine, I got it. I even filed a complaint for death threats. “
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