'I'd be better off dead': Labour MP reveals daily social media abuse and responds to people who say 'just toughen up'

  • Labour

Labour MP Paula Sherriff said she cannot remember the last time she did not receive abuse online, as she revealed her experiences with hate speech on social media.

The MP said: "I simply cannot remember the last day that went by that I didn’t receive messages saying, I’d be better off dead, that was last night," while acknowledging the worrying attitudes of those who say "just toughen up".

The shadow minister for mental health and chair of the all-party parliamentary group on hate crime is one of a number of MPs who have spoken out on abusive comments online.

"It seems more and more these days that people are using hate speech as part of everyday language, a lot of social barriers appear to have disappeared," Ms Sherriff said on Wednesday at a Counter Hate And Extremism event.

Dewsbury MP Paula Sherriff says she had hoped there would be change following the murder of Jo Cox in 2016. Credit: PA

The MP said she had hoped attitudes would change following the murder of MP Jo Cox in June 2016.

"I still struggle to come to terms with Jo’s death, but at that time, I genuinely hoped that her legacy would be a better world for us all - Sadly, how wrong I was," Ms Sherriff continued.

"As an MP I experience hate and abuse on a daily basis, I simply cannot remember the last day that went by that I didn’t receive messages saying, I’d be better off dead, that was last night.

"That I’ll get what’s coming to me - most days. That I’m a fat, useless, and a word beginning with C. The list is endless."

The MP added: "Along with this, perhaps more worryingly, is a quiet acceptance that people suffering abuse should just toughen up and get on with it, it comes with the job - it never does."

The MP said it seems 'as if it's acceptable to use hate language and speech that I actually thought we'd seen the back of in the 1970s'. Credit: PA

The Dewsbury MP made the comments at an event to showcase 21 projects countering hate and extremism in UK communities, organised by Google’s charity arm, and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which launched the initiative last year as part of a £1m innovation fund.

Ronan Harris, Google vice president and managing director for UK & Ireland, said he believed the tech giant was making progress on the issue and had deployed technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence to help identify and take down material.

"We’re now finding, particularly on things like extremist violent content on our platforms, the AI machine learning is taking down the vast majority of this, identifying it and taking it down before it’s even had a single view," he said.

Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott has previously urged Twitter to take action over "highly offensive racist and misogynist" abuse on the social network, after a major study found thousands of tweets disproportionately targeting black female politicians and journalists.