Refugees Welcome? Online Hate Speech and Sentiments in Twitter in Spain during the Reception of the Boat Aquarius

Abstract

High-profile events can trigger expressions of hate speech online, which in turn modifies attitudes and offline behavior towards stigmatized groups. This paper addresses the first path of this process using manual and computational methods to analyze the stream of Twitter messages in Spanish around the boat Aquarius (n = 24,254) before and after the announcement of the Spanish government to welcome the boat in June 2018, a milestone for asylum seekers acceptance in the EU and an event that was highly covered by media. It was observed that most of the messages were related to a few topics and had a generally positive sentiment, although a significant part of messages expressed rejection or hate—often supported by stereotypes and lies—towards refugees and migrants and towards politicians. These expressions grew after the announcement of hosting the boat, although the general sentiment of the messages became more positive. We discuss the theoretical, practical, and methodological implications of the study, and acknowledge limitations referred to the examined timeframe and to the preliminary condition of the conclusions.

Digital footprints of Kashmiri Pandit migration on Twitter

“…The strong negative emotions in the tweets tended to be directed instead against those that were perceived to be blocking this return, and not doing enough to facilitate the homecoming. The latter echoes previous analyses of tweets about migrants, in the sense of Twitter being used to express frustration against, or disagreement with, politicians (Arcila-Calderón et al, 2021;Nganji;Cockburn, 2020). In addition, there were many news-sharing and question-asking tweets.…”

Sentiment Analysis for Fake News Detection

“…SA models, methods, and techniques have been successfully applied in the context of text analytics; in applications such as the analysis of reviews on products and services [128,144]; in the analysis of social media posts in Twitter [145,146], Facebook [147], Instagram [148], etc. ; in the detection of social spam to prevent normal users from being unfairly overwhelmed with unwanted or fake content via social media [149]; in the detection or irony, sarcasm, and satire in formal and informal text [150,151]; in the detection of sexism, racism, bullying, harassment, and hate speech [152][153][154][155][156]; in influence and reputation analysis [157,158]; in political [159,160], social [161,162], and economic analysis [163,164]; in security monitoring [165]; and in health and well-being analyses [166,167].…”

El discurso de odio en Twitter durante la crisis migratoria de Ceuta en mayo de 2021

“…Estos autores consideran que ese "tono negativo" puede tener su origen en que "el fenómeno migratorio" en los medios presenta una "naturaleza negativa", por encontrarse con frecuencia "relacionado con acontecimientos o circunstancias hostiles de carácter bélico, económico, político, demográfico y/o climático" (p. 379). También abordan la estigmatización de los refugiados a través de mensajes de odio en las redes sociales Frías y Seoane (2019), y Arcila-Calderón et al (2021b).…”