Researchers at the University of Maryland who found that chatroom participants with female usernames receive 25 times the number of threatening or sexually explicit private message than counterparts with male usernames stumbled upon the discovery by accident.
Originally, lead researcher Michel Cukier, assistant professor in the Center for Risk and Reliability in the Clark School?s Department of Mechanical Engineering, set out with the hypothesis that “talkative” programmed chatroom “bots” ? short for robots ? would receive more threatening messages than “silent” bots. Though that hypothesis proved false, undergraduate researcher Bob Meyers discovered an enormous gender bias while trolling through the log data.
“When I looked at the messages from one chatroom that had five male usernames, all their files were small, maybe a couple kilobits,” said Meyers, a sophomore from Parkville. “But there was one bot with a huge file, maybe 100 kilobits ? and it had a female username.”
Originally, the usernames had been chosen randomly, but after Meyers? realization, the study was reconfigured with an equal number of male, female and ambiguous names.
On average, female users received an average of 163 malicious private messages a day.
“We were surprised at the magnitude of the responses,” Cukier said. “In the big picture, when you are on the Internet, you have to be aware that someone will possibly try to contact you. Even if you disguise your name, you have to be careful of your behavior.”
Participants with ambiguous usernames were six times as likely to receive malicious messages than male users. The study looked at IRC or Internet Relay Chatrooms specifically, often popular locations for file-sharing and downloading, online games, work and special interest groups.
The IRC chatrooms can be especially dangerous places for naive computer users, Meyers said, because savvy predators can trick novices into downloading links that will open portals in their computers to would-be hackers, who then can retrieve anything on the computer, including personal information.
“It?s a much more hostile environment to females than I thought,” Meyers said.
“When my mother found out this information, she took steps to make sure my 15-year-old sister is careful.”
