Thirty years of research into hate speech: topics of interest and their evolution
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Thirty years of research into hate speech: topics of interest and their evolution Alice Tontodimamma1 · Eugenia Nissi2 · Annalina Sarra3 · Lara Fontanella3 Received: 28 January 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The exponential growth of social media has brought with it an increasing propagation of hate speech and hate based propaganda. Hate speech is commonly defined as any communication that disparages a person or a group on the basis of some characteristics such as race, colour, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion. Online hate diffusion has now developed into a serious problem and this has led to a number of international initiatives being proposed, aimed at qualifying the problem and developing effective counter-measures. The aim of this paper is to analyse the knowledge structure of hate speech literature and the evolution of related topics. We apply co-word analysis methods to identify different topics treated in the field. The analysed database was downloaded from Scopus, focusing on a number of publications during the last thirty years. Topic and network analyses of literature showed that the main research topics can be divided into three areas: “general debate hate speech versus freedom of expression”,“hate-speech automatic detection and classification by machine-learning strategies”, and “gendered hate speech and cyberbullying”. The understanding of how research fronts interact led to stress the relevance of machine learning approaches to correctly assess hatred forms of online speech. Keywords Online hate speech · Bibliometrics analysis · Topic models · Latent Dirichlet allocation Mathematics Subject Classification MSC 62-02 · MSC 62P25
Introduction In recent years, the ways in which people receive news, and communicate with one another, have been revolutionised by the Internet, and especially by social networks. It is a natural activity, in societies where freedom of speech is recognised, for people to express their opinions. From an era in which individuals communicated their ideas, usually orally and Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1119 2-020-03737-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Annalina Sarra [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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only to small numbers of other people, we have moved on to an era in which individuals can make free use of a variety of diffusion channels in order to communicate, instantaneously, with people who are a long distance away; in addition, more and more people make use of online platforms not only to interact with each other, but also to share news. The detachment created by being enabled to write, without any obligation to reveal oneself directly, means that this new medium of virtual communication allows people to feel greater freedom in the way they express themselves. Unfortunately, though, there is also a dark side to this system. Social media h
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