Abstract
AbstractDo spatial socioeconomic features influence a digital behaviour like cyberhate? Our contribution provides an answer to this question, showing how high levels of income inequality determine high volumes of hate tweets in Italy. Our findings are robust to potential endogeneity problems of income inequality, as well as to the inclusion of confounding factors and to competing estimation strategies. Additionally, we find that education does not act as a protective factor against cyberhate in unequal places, aligning with existing evidence showing that inequality may trigger intolerance, including among educated people, threatening the perceived stability of social positions. Also, in the Italian case, the perception of economic insecurity fuels cyberhate, alongside the transmission of self-interest values along family generations. The latter finding relates to existing evidence supporting the role of persistent social norms in shaping people’s attitudes.
Highlights
IntroductionLabelled as ‘cyberhate’, is a fast-growing phenomenon
Online hate, labelled as ‘cyberhate’, is a fast-growing phenomenon
Columns 1–2 report the estimates of stage 1 of the 2PM, where we assess the risk factors associated with the occurrence of online hate at local level, with and without the inclusion of the interaction between income inequality and education among regressors
Summary
Labelled as ‘cyberhate’, is a fast-growing phenomenon. In the European Union, more than 75% of Internet users witnessed some sort of online hate speech on digital social platforms (Eurobarometer, 2016); in the USA, the share is about 66% (Duggan, 2017). The data show that the majority of cyberhate comes from people unrelated to any organised hate group (Hall, 2013). This worrying trend has pushed online hate up the research (Müller et al, 2018; Silva et al, 2016) and policy (Gagliardone et al, 2015) agenda.
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