What is the nature of the racist and xenophobic hate speech disseminated on social media in Southern Europe? Topic modelling of anti-immigration messages posted on X and YouTube in Spain, Italy and Greece
Article Sidebar
173)How to Cite
442
Abstract
One of the greatest challenges facing democratic societies today is hate speech, that spreads massively and uncontrollably through social media. particularly racist and xenophobic speech, the category of discrimination in which most hate crimes are recorded annually in Southern Europe. In this context, many studies have already focused on analysing hate on X (formerly Twitter), but few have studied other platforms or specifically focused on messages directed at migrants and refugees, or in languages other than English. The present work aims to analyse, using computational methods, anti-immigration hate speech spread through Twitter messages and YouTube comments, in the contexts and languages of the main Southern European countries: Spain, Italy, and Greece. Specifically, after conducting a manual classification of messages about migrants and/or refugees on both platforms and in the three Mediterranean countries, the most frequent words were analysed, and topic modelling was applied to the messages classified as racist and/or xenophobic. In general terms, the underlying topics in these messages mostly identify immigrant and/or refugee groups as a realistic and/or symbolic threat to the receiving countries, which is directly related to the findings of previous works where media and audience frames of negative representations of migration were studied. Furthermore, in all three countries, there appears to be a predominance of hate directed at Arab and Muslim communities, which stands out in comparison to the proportion of hate aimed at other outgroups.
References
AbdelHamid, M., Jafar, A., & Rahal, Y. (2022). Levantine hate speech detection in Twitter. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 12(1), 121. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-022-00950-4
Aldamen, Y. (2023). Xenophobia and hate speech towards refugees on social media: Reinforcing causes, negative effects, defense and response mechanisms against that speech. Societies, 13(4), 83. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc13040083
Amores, J. J. & Arcila-Calderón, C. (2019). Deconstructing the symbolic visual frames of refugees and migrants in the main Western European media. In Proceedings of the Seventh international conference on technological ecosystems for enhancing multiculturality (pp. 911-918). Retrieved from https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3362789.3362896
Amores, J. J., Arcila-Calderón, C., & Stanek, M. (2019). Visual frames of migrants and refugees in the main Western European media. Economics and sociology, 12(3), 147-161. https://doi.org/10.14254/2071-789X.2019/12-3/10
Amores, J. J., Arcila-Calderón, C., & Blanco-Herrero, D. (2020a). Evolution of negative visual frames of immigrants and refugees in the main media of Southern Europe. Profesional de la Información, 29(6). https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2020.nov.24
Amores, J. J., Arcila-Calderón, C., & González-de-Garay, B. (2020b). The Gendered Representation of Refugees Using Visual Frames in the Main Western European Media. Gender Issues, 37(4), 291–314. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12147-020-09248-1
Arcila-Calderón, C., Amores, J. J., Sánchez-Holgado, P., Vrysis, L., Vryzas, N., & Oller Alonso, M. (2022a). How to detect online hate towards migrants and refugees? Developing and evaluating a classifier of racist and xenophobic hate speech using shallow and deep learning. Sustainability, 14(20), 13094. https://doi.org/10.3390/su142013094
Arcila-Calderón, C., Sánchez-Holgado, P., Quintana-Moreno, C., Amores, J. J., & Blanco-Herrero, D. (2022b). Hate speech and social acceptance of migrants in Europe: analysis of tweets with geolocation. Comunicar, 30(71), 21-35. https://doi.org/10.3916/C71-2022-02
Arcila-Calderón, C., Amores, J. J., & Stanek, M. (2022c). Predicting integration of refugees: Using machine learning and synthetic populations to predict social acceptance of asylum seekers in European regions. In A. A. Salah, E. E. Korkmaz, & T. Bircan (Eds.), Data Science for Migration and Mobility (pp. 310-335). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197267103.003.0014
Avraamidou, M. & Eftychios, E. (2022). Migrant Racialization on Twitter during a Border and a Pandemic Crisis. International Communication Gazette, 84(3), 227-251. https://doi.org/10.1177/17480485211054301
Badjatiya, P., Gupta, S., Gupta, M., & Varma, V. (2017, April). Deep learning for hate speech detection in tweets. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion (pp. 759-760). https://doi.org/10.1145/3041021.3054223
Banaji, S. (2013). Everyday racism and “my tram experience”: emotion, civic performance and learning on YouTube. Comunicar, 20(40). https://doi.org/10.3916/C40-2013-02-07
Bansak, K., Hainmueller, J., & Hangartner, D. (2016). How economic, humanitarian, and religious concerns shape European attitudes toward asylum seekers. Science, 354(6309), 217-222. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aag2147
Blanco-Herrero, D., Amores, J. J., & Sánchez-Holgado, P. (2023). Migrants and Refugees in Southern Europe Beyond the News Stories: Lessons to be Learned. In C. Arcila-Calderón & A. Veglis (Eds.), Migrants and refugees in Southern Europe beyond the news stories: Photographs, hate, and journalists’ perceptions (pp. 101-150). Lexington Books.
Blanco-Herrero, D., Amores, J. J., & Sánchez-Holgado, P. (2021). Citizen perceptions of fake news in Spain: socioeconomic, demographic, and ideological differences. Publications, 9(3), 35. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9030035
Boomgaarden, H. G. & Vliegenthart, R. (2007). Explaining the rise of anti-immigrant parties: The role of news media content. Electoral Studies, 26(2), 404-417. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2006.10.018
Boyd, D. M. & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210-230. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x
Breazu, P. & Machin, D. (2023). Racism is not just hate speech: Ethnonationalist victimhood in YouTube comments about the Roma during Covid-19. Language in Society, 52(3), 511-531. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404522000070
Boateng, F. D., Pryce, D. K., & Chenane, J. L. (2021). I may be an immigrant, but I am not a criminal: Examining the association between the presence of immigrants and crime rates in Europe. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 22(3), 1105-1124. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-020-00790-1
Brown, R. (2000). Social Identity Theory: past achievements, current problems and future challenges. European Journal of Social Psychology, 30(6), 745-778. https://doi.org/10.1002/1099-0992(200011/12)30:6<745::AID-EJSP24>3.0.CO;2-O
Brown, A. (2018). What is So Special About Online (as Compared to Offline) Hate Speech? Ethnicities, 18, 297-326. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1468796817709846
Burnap, P. & Williams, M. L. (2015). Cyber hate speech on Twitter: An application of machine classification and statistical modeling for policy and decision making. Policy & internet, 7(2), 223-242. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.85
Bustos-Martínez, L., de-Santiago-Ortega, P. P., Martínez-Miró, M. A., & Rengifo-Hidalgo, M. S. (2019). Discursos de odio: una epidemia que se propaga en la red. Estado de la cuestión sobre el racismo y la xenofobia en las redes sociales. Mediaciones Sociales, 18, 25-42. https://doi.org/10.5209/meso.64527
Carvalho, P., Caled, D., Silva, C., Batista, F. & Ribeiro, R. (2023). The expression of hate speech against Afro-descendant, Roma, and LGBTQ+ communities in YouTube comments. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00085.car
Chouliaraki, L., & Stolic, T. (2017). Rethinking media responsibility in the refugee ‘crisis’: A visual typology of European news. Media, Culture and Society, 39(8), 1162-1177. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717726163
Contrada, R. J., Gary, M. L., Coups, E., Egeth, J. D., Sewell, A., Ewell, K., Goyal, T. M., & Chasse, V. (2001). Measures of ethnicity-related stress: Psychometric properties, ethnic group differences, and associations with well-being. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 31, 1775-1820. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2001.tb00205.x
Cortina, A. (2017). Aporofobia, el rechazo al pobre. Un desafío para la democracia. Paidós.
Crenshaw, K. W. (1994). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. In M. A. Fineman (Ed.), The public nature of private violence (pp. 93-118). Routledge.
DataReportal. (2022). Digital 2022. Retrieved from https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2022
Díaz Ruiz, C. & Nilsson, T. (2023). Disinformation and echo chambers: how disinformation circulates on social media through identity-driven controversies. Journal of public policy & marketing, 42(1), 18-35. https://doi.org/10.1177/07439156221103852
Díez Nicolás, J. (2009). Construcción de un índice de Xenofobia-Racismo. Revista del Ministerio de Trabajo e Inmigración, 80, 21-38. Retrieved from http://www.mitramiss.gob.es/es/publica/pub_electronicas/destacadas/revista/numeros/80/est01.pdf
Ekman M. (2019). Anti-immigration and racist discourse in social media. European Journal of Communication, 34(6), 606-618. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323119886151
Esses, V. M., Jackson, L. M., & Armstrong, T. L. (1998). Intergroup competition and attitudes toward immigrants and immigration: An instrumental model of group conflict. Journal of social issues, 54(4), 699-724. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1998.tb01244.x
Esses, V. M., Medianu, S., & Lawson, A. S. (2013). Uncertainty, threat, and the role of the media in promoting the dehumanization of immigrants and refugees. Journal of Social Issues, 69(3), 518-536. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12027
Evolvi, G. (2019). Emotional Politics, Islamophobic Tweet. The Hashtags #Brexit and #chiudiamoiporti. Partecipazione e conflitto, 12, 871-897. Retrieved from http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/paco/article/view/21281
Ferreira, C. (2019). Vox como representante de la derecha radical en España: un estudio sobre su ideología. Revista Española de Ciencia Política, 51, 73-98. https://doi.org/10.21308/recp.51.03
González-Baquero, W., Amores, J. J., & Arcila-Calderón, C. (2023). The Conversation around Islam on Twitter: Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis of Tweets about the Muslim Community in Spain since 2015. Religions, 14(6), 724. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14060724
Islas-Carmona, J. O. (2008). El prosumidor: El actor comunicativo de la sociedad de la ubicuidad. Palabra clave, 11(1), 29-39. http://www.scielo.org.co/pdf/pacla/v11n1/v11n01a03.pdf
Jacobi, C., van Atteveldt, W., & Welbers, K. (2015). Quantitative analysis of large amounts of journalistic texts using topic modelling. Digital Journalism, 4, 89-106. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2015.1093271
Kim, Y. & Lowrey, W. (2015). Who are citizen journalists in the social media environment? Digital Journalism, 3(2), 298-314. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.930245
Krzyżanowski, M., Triandafyllidou, A., & Wodak, R. (2018). The mediatization and the politicization of the “refugee crisis” in Europe. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 16(1-2), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2017.1353189
Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H., & Moon, S. (2010). What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 591-600). https://doi.org/10.1145/1772690.1772751
Lacan, J. (1977). Los cuatro principios fundamentales del psicoanálisis. Seminarios 11. Barral Editores.
Lamerichs, N., Nguyen, D., Melguizo, M. C. P., Radojevic, R., & Lange-Böhmer, A. (2018). Elite male bodies: The circulation of alt-Right memes and the framing of politicians on Social Media. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 15(1), 180-206. Retrieved from https://participations.org/Volume%2015/Issue%201/11.pdf
Latorre, J. P. & Amores, J. J. (2021). Topic modelling of racist and xenophobic YouTube comments. Analyzing hate speech against migrants and refugees spread through YouTube in Spanish. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality (TEEM’21) (pp. 456-460). https://doi.org/10.1145/3486011.3486494
Lilleker, D. & Pérez-Escolar, M. (2023). Demonising migrants in contexts of extremism: Analysis of hate speech in UK and Spain. Politics and Governance, 11(2), 127-137. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i2.6302
Maarouf, A., Pröllochs, N., & Feuerriegel, S. (2024). The virality of hate speech on social media. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW1) (Vol. 8, pp. 1-22). https://doi.org/10.1145/3641025
Matamoros-Fernández, A. (2017). Platformed racism: the mediation and circulation of Australia race-based controversy on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Information, Communication and Society, 20, 930-946. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1293130
Matamoros-Fernández, A. & Farkas, J. (2021). Racism, Hate Speech, and Social Media: A Systematic Review and Critique. Television & New Media, 22(2), 205-224. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476420982230
Meng, Q., Suresh, T., Lee, R. K. W., & Chakraborty, T. (2023). Predicting hate intensity of twitter conversation threads. Knowledge-Based Systems, 275, 110644. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2023.110644
Miran, A. Z. & Yahia, H. S. (2023). Hate Speech Detection in Social Media (Twitter) Using Neural Network. Journal of Mobile Multimedia, 19(3), 765-798. https://doi.org/10.13052/jmm1550-4646.1936
Müller, K. & Schwarz, C. (2021). Fanning the flames of hate: Social media and hate crime. Journal of the European Economic Association, 19(4), 2131-2167. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvaa045
Oleaque, J. M. (2015). Racismo en internet: webs, redes sociales y crecimiento internacional. Informe VIU. Universidad Internacional de Valencia. Retrieved from https://www.gitanos.org/upload/53/79/Informe-Racismo-Digital.pdf
OSCE–ODIHR (2023). Hate Crime Reporting. Retrieved from https://hatecrime.osce.org/racist-and-xenophobic-hate-crime
Pew Research Center. (2021). Social media use in 2021. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/
Pitropakis, N., Kokot, K., Gkatzia, D., Ludwiniak, R., Mylonas, A., & Kandias, M. (2020). Monitoring users’ behavior: Anti-immigration speech detection on Twitter. Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction, 2(3), 192-215. https://doi.org/10.3390/make2030011
Pogliano, A. (2019). Media, Politica e Migrazioni in Europa. Carocci Editore.
Quandt, T. (2018). Dark Participation. Media and Communication, 6(4), 36-48. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v6i4.1519
Reichelmann, A., Hawdon, J., Costello, M., Ryana, J., Blayac, C., Llorent, V., Oksanen, A., Räsänen, P., & Zych, I. (2020). Hate knows no boundaries: Online hate in six nations. Deviant Behavior, 1-12 https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2020.1722337
Salminen, J., Hopf, M., Chowdhury, S. A., Jung, S. G., Almerekhi, H., & Jansen, B. J. (2020). Developing an online hate classifier for multiple social media platforms. Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences, 10(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13673-019-0205-6
Saridou, T., Amores, J. J., Oller, M., Alonso, A. V., & Panagiotou, N. (2023). Negative perceptions and hate speech toward migrants and refugees in Southern Europe through social media. In C. Arcila-Calderón & A. Veglis (Eds.), Migrants and refugees in Southern Europe beyond the news stories: Photographs, hate, and journalists’ perceptions (pp. 101-150). Lexington Books.
Schemer, C. (2012). The influence of news media on stereotypic attitudes toward immigrants in a political campaign. Journal of Communication, 62(5), 739-757. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01672.x
Schmidt, A. & Wiegand, M. A. (2017, April). A survey on hate speech detection using natural language processing. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (pp. 1-10). ACL. Retrieved from https://aclanthology.org/W17-1101.pdf
Silva, L., Mondal, M., Correa, D., Benevenuto, F., & Weber, I. (2016, March). Analyzing the targets of hate in online social media. In Proceedings of the Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (pp. 687-690). https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1603.07709
Stechemesser, A., Wenz, L., Kotz, M., & Levermann, A. (2021). Strong increase of racist tweets outside of climate comfort zone in Europe. Environmental Research Letters, 16(11), 114001. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac28b3
Stephan, W. G. & Stephan, C. W. (2000). An integrated threat theory of prejudice. In S. Oskamp (Ed.), Reducing prejudice and discrimination (pp. 23–45). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Valdez-Apolo, M. B., Arcila-Calderón, C., & Amores, J. J. (2019). El discurso del odio hacia migrantes y refugiados a través del tono y los marcos de los mensajes en Twitter. Revista de la Asociación Española de Investigación de la Comunicación, 6(12), 361-384. https://doi.org/10.24137/raeic.6.12.2
Vučković, J. & Lučić, S. (2023). Hate speech and social media. TEME, 1, 191-207. https://doi.org/10.22190/TEME221006012V
Section
RIGHTS TRANSFER
By submitting the article for evaluation and subsequent publication in Communicaton & Society, the AUTHOR grants exclusive economic and/or exploitation rights: reproduction, distribution, public communication, transformation/translation/creation of derivative works, and commercialisation to the University of Navarra through its Publications Service, for the maximum legal period in force -the author's lifetime and seventy years after his or her death or declaration of death-, in any country, and in any of the current and future publishing modalities, both in print and electronic versions.
In the event that the article is not accepted for publication, this transfer of rights lapses with the communication of the refusal to the AUTHOR.
The AUTHOR affirms that the article is unpublished, that it has not been sent simultaneously to another publication medium and that the rights have not been transferred exclusively previously. He is responsible to the University of Navarra through its Publications Service for the authorship and originality of his work, as well as for all pecuniary charges that may arise for the University of Navarra through its Publications Service, in favor of third parties due to actions, claims or conflicts arising from the breach of obligations by the AUTHOR.