Description
This project aims to contribute to preventing the appearance, development and spread of xenophobic and intolerant attitudes among the population in Spain. This project will work towards building an alternative discourse that can be used to counter arguments that feed hate speech on-line. In particular, we will focus on selected on-line Spanish newspapers, by identifying, analysing and disassembling comments made by users against migrants and Roma people. In addition, young people and opinion leaders will be trained in the knowledge, skills and tools to combat hate speech and to report an alternative discourse based on human rights. To address the problems highlighted above, the project will carry out the following outputs: - The implementation of a hate speech on-line watchdog to monitor news on on-line newspapers. - A website with relevant contents which contribute to building an alternative discourse. - A follow-up of Spanish public policies to prevent and combat hate speech at national and international level. - A workshop on how to combat hate speech on-line. - An on-line course on human rights and hate speech.
Summary of project results
The Project was born to prevent the cause, the development and the propagation of hate speech against immigrant and Roma populations in the digital newspapers Elpais.com, Elmundo.es and 20minutos.es, the most visited online papers in Spain. The aim was to identify, analyse and counter the arguments that feed the online hate speech. In addition, the project has trained in knowledge, skills and resources to online activists in order to be able to fight the cyberhate. 4777 comments and posts were identified and analysed, in over 400 news about immigration and Roma population. The monitoring confirmed that those forae are full of hate and intolerance and almost 60% of those comments by the papers readers were classified as intolerant in its different modes: hate, prejudice, stereotypes, argumentative tricks, and low intensity racism. It is not easy to counter these comments, but the experience of reflecting, designing and intervene in at least 500 times in these forae, brought in new perspectives on how to give arguments and how to guide the fight against online hate speech in general. The target was not the intolerant users but their potential audience: the readers, most of them ambivalent are mainly passive in these sorts of forae. The target was also those internet users who are against online hate speech but who lack of tools to fight against it. This is why training was particularly important; specific contents and tools were developed and spread in an online course for 50 internet activists. One of the main tools was the infographics developed during the project and available on the observatory web site.
Summary of bilateral results