Browsing by Subject "Hate speech"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
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    Demonising migrants in contexts of extremism: analysis of hate speech in UK and Spain
    (Cogitatio Press, 2023-05-17) Lilleker, Darren; Pérez Escolar, Marta; Comunicación; Facultad de Comunicación y Documentación
    Hate speech has been seen as a problem within democratic societies that has been exacerbated by social media. While platforms claim to moderate content, this proves impossible. Studying popular platforms in the UK and Spain and examining content within community pages dedicated to right-wing parties, we use framing analysis to identify the predominant frames in user comments that contained hate speech against migrants. Our research demonstrates a frequent use of arguments that encourage xenophobic and discriminatory attitudes to flourish. Specifically, we find that immigrants are commonly framed as potential criminals, people who steal resources and erode norms of the dominant culture and traditions. The fact that these frames are commonly used is worrying and indicates xenophobic attitudes exist within both societies under study. However, it is difficult to imagine regulatory systems that would prevent these attitudes from being expressed. Rather, we argue that it is more important to focus on correcting the conditions that cause such attitudes to take hold within a society.
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    El discurso odioso en la deliberación pública: un estudio argumentativo de las acusaciones de “turismofobia” hacia Canarias Se Agota.
    (ACEP. Ateneo de Estudios Políticos., 2025) Domínguez Armas, Álvaro; Sin departamento asociado
    En este artículo estudio los efectos del discurso odioso en la deliberación pública. Para ello tomo como referencia el debate sobre el turismo de masas en las Islas Canarias. En la primera parte del artículo reconstruyo el debate e identifico los diferentes participantes y sus posiciones respecto a la regularización del turismo. Luego me centro en las acusaciones de “turismofobia” dirigidas contra uno de los participantes: el movimiento social Canarias Se Agota. Argumento que las acusaciones de turismofobia promueven una descripción sesgada y manipuladora de las acciones de los residentes para participar en el debate público como una reacción xenófoba contra los turistas. Después, propongo formalizar estas acusaciones como ‘discurso odioso’ porque transmite un mensaje detestable sobre la víctima, pero sin centrarse en una de sus características protegidas por la ley (sexo, raza, religión, etnia, etc.). Finalmente considero tres efectos que estas acusaciones producen en el debate público: la distorsión del mensaje que Canarias Se Agota pretende transmitir, la eliminación del tópico bajo discusión y la distorsión de la posición del acusador en el debate.
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    Evaluating feature combination strategies for hate-speech detection in Spanish using linguistic features and transformers
    (Springer, 2023) García Díaz, José Antonio; Jiménez Zafra, Salud María; García Cumbreras, Miguel Ángel; Valencia García, Rafael; Informática y Sistemas; Facultades de la UMU::Facultad de Informática
    The rise of social networks has allowed misogynistic, xenophobic, and homophobic people to spread their hate-speech to intimidate individuals or groups because of their gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. The consequences of hate-speech are devastating, causing severe depression and even leading people to commit suicide. Hate-speech identification is challenging as the large amount of daily publications makes it impossible to review every comment by hand. Moreover, hate-speech is also spread by hoaxes that requires language and context understanding. With the aim of reducing the number of comments that should be reviewed by experts, or even for the development of autonomous systems, the automatic identification of hate-speech has gained academic relevance. However, the reliability of automatic approaches is still limited specifically in languages other than English, in which some of the state-of-the-art techniques have not been analyzed in detail. In this work, we examine which features are most effective in identifying hate-speech in Spanish and how these features can be combined to develop more accurate systems. In addition, we characterize the language present in each type of hate-speech by means of explainable linguistic features and compare our results with state-of-the-art approaches. Our research indicates that combining linguistic features and transformers by means of knowledge integration outperforms current solutions regarding hate-speech identification in Spanish.
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    Hate speech and polarization in participatory society
    (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2022) Pérez Escolar, Marta; Noguera-Vivo, José Manuel...et.al.; Comunicación; Pérez Escolar, Marta; Noguera-Vivo, José Manuel; Facultad de Comunicación y Documentación
    This timely volume offers a comprehensive and rigorous overview of the role of communication in the construction of hate speech and polarization in the online and offline arena. Delving into the meanings, implications, contexts and effects of extreme speech and gated communities in the media landscape, the chapters analyse misleading metaphors and rhetoric via focused case studies to understand how we can overcome the risks and threats stemming from the past decade’s defining communicative phenomena. The book brings together an international team of experts, enabling a broad, multidisciplinary approach that examines hate speech, dislike, polarization and enclave deliberation as cross axes that influence offline and digital conversations. The diverse case studies herein offer insights into international news media, television drama and social media in a range of contexts, suggesting an academic frame of reference for examining this emerging phenomenon within the field of communication studies. Offering thoughtful and much-needed analysis, this collection will be of great interest to scholars and students working in communication studies, media studies, journalism, sociology, political science, political communication and cultural industries.
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    How did we get here? The consequences of deceit in addressing political polarization
    (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021) Noguera-Vivo, José Manuel; Pérez Escolar, Marta; Comunicación; Noguera-Vivo, José Manuel; Pérez-Escolar, Marta; Facultad de Comunicación y Documentación
    The main contribution of this chapter is to study the central role information disorders play in political polarization; in concrete, the objective of this chapter is to illustrate how Spanish political elites – parties and politicians – feed radical ghettos and polarized groups, when distributing lies and fabricated stories on the Internet. For this purpose, we have applied a qualitative methodology, consisting of the case study method, to understand the potential impact of both – political polarization and false content – on the weakened quality of the Spanish democracy. The selected cases include the most popular political parties in Spain: PSOE, PP, Vox, Unidas Podemos and Ciudadanos. As we have demonstrated, political parties in Spain spread both, misinformation and disinformation. We confirm that political parties contribute to increase political polarization when they spread fabricated stories. This results in what we call diversification of polarization, which refers to people becoming isolated in multiple bubble cyber-ghettos depending upon the nature of the issue under debate, i.e. inequality between sexes, climate change, immigration issues, the high prices of rent or the Catalonian independence movement, among other examples. As a consequence, the act of lying increases the diversification of polarization and reduces the possibilities of achieving consensus.
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    Introduction to the dilemmas and struggles of participatory society
    (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021) Pérez Escolar, Marta; Noguera-Vivo, José Manuel; Comunicación; Pérez-Escolar, Marta; Noguera-Vivo, José Manuel; Facultad de Comunicación y Documentación
    Multiple authors have already warned about the disadvantages that arise in participatory society due to the peculiarities and traits of online scenarios: Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson proposed the term ‘cyberbalkanization’ to describe the fragmentation of the internet into special interest groups. One of the most representative and recent examples of the dark side of participatory society was the attack on the US Capitol at the beginning of January 2021. For that reason, when polarized ideological ghettos magnify information disorders and reinforce outrageous behaviors, like the assault on the US Capitol, it is essential to start counterattacking the falsehood, combating hate speech and breaking up social segregation and political fragmentation. Aiming to contribute to the accumulative knowledge about stereotypes and distorted images disseminated by mass media, Cristina Algaba, Beatriz Tome-Alonso and Giulia Cimini attempt to study the representation of the Muslim world in prime-time TV series broadcast in Spain, a country with a long-established Muslim population and a strategic migratory destination.
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    Sentir el odio: análisis de la gravedad percibida de los discursos de odio en la población española.
    (Federación Española de Sociología, 2024) Brändle, Gaspar; Cáceres Zapatero, María Dolores; Paz Rebollo, María Antonia; Sociología
    This research aims to analyze the opinions, attitudes, and perceptions of the population regarding seriousness of hate speech (HS) that is spread on the Internet. For that purpose, a self-made survey was conducted on a sample of 1,022 people aged over 16 residing in Spain. The results allow us to conclude that the surveyed population generally perceives hate speech to be highly serious. The analysis also enabled to identify four types of hate speech: racist and exclusionary hatred, sexist and gender hatred, violent and ironic hatred, and ideological hatred. Variables such as age, gender, ideology, education level, social media usage frequency or individuals' stand on hate speech, contribute to discerning their sensitivity levels towards these hate speech variations.
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    Spanish MTLHateCorpus 2023: multi-task learning for hate speech detection to identify speech type, target, target group and intensity
    (Elsevier, 2025-08) Ronghao Pan; García Díaz, José Antonio; Valencia García, Rafael; Informática y Sistemas; Facultades de la UMU::Facultad de Informática
    The rise of digital communication has exacerbated the challenge of tackling harmful speech online, particularly hate speech, which dehumanises individuals or groups on the basis of traits such as race, gender or ethnicity. This study highlights the urgent need for fine-grained detection methods that take into account several subtasks of hate speech detection, including its intensity, determining the groups to which hate speech is directed, and whether the target is an individual or a group. Furthermore, there is a gap in comprehensive Spanish language corpora that cover these subtasks of hate speech detection. Therefore, we created a novel corpus entitled Spanish MTLHateCorpus 2023 to facilitate the analysis of hate speech in these subtasks and evaluated the effectiveness of the multi-task learning strategy evaluating mBART and T5, comparing its results with other Large Language Models using Zero-Shot Learning as a lower bound and an ensemble based on the mode of several Fine-Tuning as an upper bound. The results achieved by the Multi-Task Learning strategy demonstrated its potential to increase model versatility, allowing a single model to effectively tackle multiple tasks while achieving competitive results, particularly in target group recognition. However, the ensemble learning slightly outperforms the Multi-Task Learning strategy.
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    Stances on hate speech: Population opinions and attitudes
    (2023) Cáceres Zaparero, M. D.; Paz Rebollo, M. A.; Brändle, Gaspar; Sociología
    This research aims to know the opinions and attitudes of the Spanish population towards hate speech through a survey of 1,022 persons of both sexes and over 16 years of age. The results show a high awareness of hate speech: participants could identify these messages, assess their different intensities of severity, and understand the harm it causes. This high awareness may be because almost half of the sample has felt alluded to by these types of messages at some point. This group is more proactive in denouncing and counterattacking hate messages, although it is more frequent to remain on the sidelines. There is a hierarchy in the ratings in which racist and sexist comments are considered more severe thanthose directed at other minority groups (e.g., homeless people). Among the main reasons why people publish these expressions, participants point to the education of the authors, in particular, the rudeness and disrespect that are also perceived as a generalized aspect in today’s society. The polarized Spanish political context is seen as beneficial to the appearance of these messages, as well as the lack of a democratic culture that respects ideological diversity. What is most interesting is that although there is awareness of the seriousness of hate messages in other spheres and towards various groups, hate speech has become normalized in politics, as previously stated.
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    The representation of migrants in Spanish judicial decisions: using corpus data to refute hate speech
    (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) Marín Pérez, María José; Almela Sánchez-Lafuente, Ángela; Filología Inglesa
    The phenomenon of immigration and its depiction in media texts have been examined profusely within the field of corpus-based discourse analysis (Gabrielatos and Baker, 2008; Baker et al., 2013; Blinder and Allen, 2016). This research seeks to present it as reflected on a corpus of 600 judicial decisions issued by Spanish courts in the years 2016 and 2017. This analysis was motivated by the rise of extreme right-wing parties in Europe in the recent years, which dehumanise immigrants and portray them as a threat to the welfare state. On a first approach, the results appear to dissociate immigration and crime since a considerable percentage of the keywords obtained (c. 20%) revolves around three major topoi, namely, family, territory/access, and legal punishment, not showing evidence of any major offences or crimes amongst the top-ranking lexicon. The study of the collocate networks of the KWs within the category legal punishment confirms our initial perception, in fact, out of 21 collocates, only the word delito (crime) itself collocates with terms referring to typified crimes such as violencia (violence). In parallel, the data were triangulated using the text-classification software UMTextStats (García-Díaz et al., 2018). The results of this second analysis confirm our initial observations.