Twitter and Crime: The Effect of Social Movements on GenderBased Violence

Michele Battisti, Ilpo Kauppinen and Britta Rude

No 381, ifo Working Paper Series from ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich

Abstract: This paper asks whether social movements taking place on Twitter affect genderbased violence (GBV). Using Twitter data and machine learning methods, we construct a novel data set on the prevalence of Twitter conversations about GBV. We then link this data to weekly crime reports at the federal state level from the United States. We exploit the high-frequency nature of our data and an event study design to establish a causal impact of Twitter social movements on GBV. Our results point out that Twitter tweets related to GBV lead to a decrease in reported crime rates. The evidence shows that perpetrators commit these crimes less due to increased social pressure and perceived social costs. The results indicate that social media could significantly decrease reported GBV and might facilitate the signaling of social norms.

Keywords: Economics of gender; US; domestic abuse; public policy; criminal law; illegal behavior and the enforcement of law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J16 J78 K14 K42 O51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cmp, nep-law, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/wp-2022-381-battisti-kaup ... r-based-violence.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ifowps:_381

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ifo Working Paper Series from ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().