Racist hate speech hidden between tweets

Thanks to the support of the Catalan Agency for Development Cooperation (AACD), the FAS, the CVC-UAB, and the International Institute for Nonviolent Action (NOVACT) carried out a research on racism and antiracism on social media. The research is focused on the specific case of agricultural seasonal workers and it is directed to analyse messages with racist content and its argumentative relationship with the pandemic and the 2020 alarm status.  

This study has analysed more than 1000 tweets with content related to seasonal workers and coronavirus, and the results have shown that the 8% of the messages are explicitly racist and attitudes against the migrant workers in agriculture, accused of the spread of COVID-19. 

 Nearly 36% of the tweets are classified as “neutral”, but this study deepened in the dangers that these kind of messages can entail, since even if they are hidden under the label of “objective facts”, they can strengthen racist ideas through repetitions and associations between pandemic and migration.

The report has also shown that a third part of the messages that were analysed support social justice, including a set of recommendations on what can we do to help changing the virtual civic space and turn it into a space for the defense of human rights. 

Discriminatory and hate speeches have found their place in the digital environments of social media, especially since the quarantine, and have turned it into the perfect media of propagation. As a matter of fact, the report emerged from the necessity of understanding, monitoring and reverting the new ways of creating racist content digitally in Catalonia. It shows the capabilities of public universities, technological researching centers and social and civil organizations in order to fight for human rights.

Download here the Digital Racism and COVID-19 Report. Racist and antiracist speeches on Twitter during the pandemic (document in Spanish) 

Campaign: “Let’s break the Racist Mentality”

Within the framework of this project, the Acollida Programme of the FAS has been carrying out the past months a campaign under the title “Let’s break the Racist Mentality”. The aim of this campaign is to raise awareness on these racist speeches that we can find on social media (especially the media that seems to be neutral) and provide tools for reflection and taking action. One of the actions taken by the campaign was the opening of an “Antiracist inbox”, where any person can send proves of digital racism. The team of this Programme analyses them, denies these ideas and publishes alternative messages.