Unpacking online hate speech in Portuguese social media: a social-psychological and linguistic-discursive approach

Rita Guerra (), Paula Carvalho, Catarina Marques, Margarida Carmona, Rodrigo Sarroeira, Fernando Batista, Ricardo Ribeiro, António Fonseca, Sérgio Moro and Cláudia Silva
Additional contact information
Rita Guerra: CIS
Paula Carvalho: Centro de Línguas Literaturas e Culturas (CLLC)
Catarina Marques: Business Research Unit (BRU-ISCTE)
Rodrigo Sarroeira: Business Research Unit (BRU-ISCTE)
Fernando Batista: Iscte - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa
Ricardo Ribeiro: Iscte - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa
António Fonseca: ISTAR
Sérgio Moro: ISTAR
Cláudia Silva: ITI-LARSyS and IST

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2025, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: Abstract Building on social psychology and language sciences, this research identified core social psychological, and linguistic-discursive features of online hate speech targeting racialized, migrant and LGBTI+ communities in two social media platforms in Portugal: YouTube, and Twitter/X. The research was based on the analysis of two annotated corpora comprising 24,739 YouTube comments and associated replies, and 29,758 contextualized tweets retrieved from 2775 conversations. Overall, the results, based on the detailed annotation framework developed in this study, revealed that i) online hate speech was mainly expressed in subtle ways (i.e., indirect hate speech); ii) the main underlying process of discrimination in both direct and indirect hate speech was outgroup derogation; iii) stereotypes, threats, and dehumanization were frequently used as discursive strategies to express online hate speech; iv) specific features, like emotions, often overlooked in hate speech annotated corpora, varied in their expression depending on the specific target community; v) the use of some discursive strategies, such as realistic and symbolic threats, seem to be dependent not only on the target community but also the social media platform; vi) discursive strategies and emotions mobilized in hate speech were correlated with specific rhetorical devices and fallacies. These findings provide valuable insights into the complex landscape of online hate speech and highlight the importance of interdisciplinary, context and culturally sensitive approaches in understanding this phenomenon.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41599-025-05392-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:pal:palcom:v:12:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-025-05392-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/palcomms/about

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-025-05392-9

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().