The dark side of Guardian comments

Since 2006, readers had left 70 million comments on The Guardian's website. The newspaper knew anecdotally that some writers — particularly women — bore the brunt of what appeared below the line. In 2016, a team of six journalists and data analysts set out to quantify it.

Measuring abuse at scale

Of those 70 million comments, 1.4 million — roughly 2% — had been blocked by moderators for violating the Guardian's community standards. These ranged from ad hominem attacks and dismissive trolling ("Calm down, dear") to racial slurs and, in rare cases, threats of violence. The team used blocked comments as a proxy for abuse, examining which writers attracted disproportionate levels of hostile responses.

To study the gender dimension, the team classified article authors by gender using Genderize.io, then mapped blocked-comment rates across writers, sections, and years.

What the data showed

The 10 regular writers who received the most abuse were 8 women — four white, four non-white — and 2 Black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. Among the eight women, one was Muslim and one was Jewish.

The 10 writers who received the least abuse were all men.

The pattern was structural, not anecdotal. Articles written by women attracted more blocked comments across almost every section of the site. The disparity widened in male-dominated sections: Sport, Technology, and World News were the worst. In Sport — where women authored the fewest articles — female bylines drew sharply higher abuse rates than male ones. Fashion, the one section where most articles were written by women, was a rare reversal: there, male authors received more blocked comments.

Since around 2010, articles by women had consistently attracted a higher proportion of blocked comments than articles by men, and the gap showed no sign of closing.

Subject matter compounded the effect. Conversations about crosswords, cricket, and jazz were respectful. Articles about feminism, rape, and the Israel-Palestine conflict were not. When a woman wrote about a contentious topic in a male-dominated section, the abuse stacked.

Beyond the numbers

The investigation went beyond statistics. Three of the most-abused writers — Jessica Valenti, Steven Thrasher, and Nesrine Malik — spoke about what it felt like. Valenti described the daily experience as "walking through a gauntlet of 100 people saying 'You're stupid', 'You're terrible', 'You suck'. It's a terrible way to go to work." Thrasher spoke about the cumulative toll: "Even if I tell myself that somebody calling me a nigger or a faggot doesn't mean anything, it has a toll on me."

The team noted a broader chilling effect. Pew research cited in the investigation found that 40% of adults had experienced harassment online and 73% had witnessed it — numbers likely to silence exactly the voices most targeted.

What changed

The Guardian cut back comments on articles about migration and race, concentrating moderation resources where abuse was most likely. Unlike many news organisations, however, it chose not to disable comments entirely — arguing that the 98% of comments that were respectful enriched its journalism.

The research was later extended into a peer-reviewed paper published in Feminist Media Studies in 2018, titled "It's a terrible way to go to work," which placed the findings in the broader context of online harassment research.