This report was published by ISD Global (March 24, 2025). The research was funded by the German Federal Foreign Office.

During the 2024 European Parliament elections, TikTok became a significant campaign platform for candidates across Europe. This study analyzed comments on videos posted by French, German, and Hungarian parliamentary candidates to assess whether female candidates faced disproportionate online harassment — and what forms it took. For this analysis 326,826 comments were collected from 1,448 videos published by 102 candidates. Two annotators per language (French, German and Hungarian) analysed a randomised sample of 3,000 comments each. This resulted in a dataset of 9,000 comments across 873 videos by 74 candidates.

Key Findings

Female candidates faced substantially higher harassment. Comments on videos by women candidates contained significantly more hateful, defamatory, derogatory, and discriminatory content compared to those targeting male candidates.

Harassment targeted appearance, age, and competence. Common tactics included objectifying remarks about candidates’ physical appearance, dismissals based on age, and gendered double standards applied to assessments of political competence.

Deliberate misgendering as a harassment tool. A notable pattern emerged around the deliberate misgendering of women perceived as gender nonconforming, deployed as a targeted form of online abuse.

Democratic participation at stake. The study concludes that this disproportionate harassment creates real barriers to women’s political participation — contributing to self-censorship and limiting their engagement in democratic discourse at a critical moment.

Full Report

The full report is available at isdglobal.org.