HATE COVID-19 – Detecting Overt and Covert Hate Speech in Social Media

Summary

Based on a qualitative approach, this article explores hate speech through the eyes of the most representative minorities in Portugal, namely the Afro-descendant, Roma and LGBTQ+ communities. To this end, we conducted three focus groups, one with each community (n=17), which allowed us to investigate how the target groups perceive and experience hate speech in the Portuguese social and geopolitical context and to identify the most harmful forms of speech from their own perspective. Our results show that covert hate speech is more harmful than overt hate speech. More insightful, we found that those covert forms of hate speech often manifest as compliments and humour. These communicative strategies, anchored in positive or negative stereotypes, have motivated the normalization of hate speech, which justifies the research of strategies that allow their identification, namely in the context of automatic detection of online hate speech.