“All Is Fair in… Meme!” How Heterosexual Users Perceive and React to Memes, News, and Posts Discriminating against Sexual Minorities

Chiara Imperato (), Maria Pagano and Tiziana Mancini
Additional contact information
Chiara Imperato: Department of Humanities Social Sciences and Cultural Industries, University of Parma, 43121 Parma, Italy
Maria Pagano: Department of Psychology, Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, 40127 Bologna, Italy
Tiziana Mancini: Department of Humanities Social Sciences and Cultural Industries, University of Parma, 43121 Parma, Italy

Social Sciences, 2023, vol. 12, issue 2, 1-12

Abstract: Digital discrimination against sexual minorities is becoming prevalent. It increasingly spreads through discriminatory content that mixes text and images (e.g., memes), thus, making online discrimination more difficult to detect. The present survey study focused on digital content that is discriminatory towards sexual minorities, aiming to analyze whether a sample of heterosexual social network users (65.2% female; M age = 27.13) perceived different forms of discriminatory content (i.e., memes, news, and posts) as equally offensive and to what extent such different forms elicited the same online behavioral reactions. Furthermore, we considered how individuals’ online network heterogeneity could influence their perception of digital discrimination. Results showed that individuals perceived memes as less offensive when compared to both news and posts. Accordingly, we also found that individuals took less time to react to posts when compared to the other forms of content. In addition, those who declared that they had a heterogenous online network perceived memes as more offensive than those who did not. Finally, regarding reacting behaviors, overall results showed that memes elicited few proactive behaviors and more acquiescent and ignoring behaviors than news and posts. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

Keywords: online discrimination; meme; hate speech; hateful news; online intergroup contact (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/2/74/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/2/74/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:12:y:2023:i:2:p:74-:d:1052156

Access Statistics for this article

Social Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Yvonne Chu

More articles in Social Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().