EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime

Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: This paper investigates the link between social media and hate crime using Facebook data. We study the case of Germany, where the recently emerged right-wing party Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has developed a major social media presence. We show that right-wing anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook predicts violent crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage. To further establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation in major internet and Facebook outages, which fully undo the correlation between social media and hate crime. We further find that the effect decreases with distracting news events; increases with user network interactions; and does not hold for posts unrelated to refugees. Our results suggest that social media can act as a propagation mechanism between online hate speech and real-life violent crime.Keywords: social media, hate crime, minorities, Germany, AfD JEL Classification: D74, J15, Z10, D72, O35, N32, N34.

Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-his, nep-net, nep-pay and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... 373-2018_schwarz.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime (2021) Downloads
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:cge:wacage:373

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Snape ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:cge:wacage:373