Detecting hate speech in the Greek online environment: a quantitative and qualitative analysis in the context of the 2019 European election campaign

This paper aims to illustrate the scope, visibility and modalities of hate speech articulation in the Greek virtual public sphere during the 2019 European election campaign period. In the last decade, hate speech has undergone a sharp increase in Greece (European Commission against Racism and Intolerance 2015), while, at the same time, the rise of far-right extremism and particularly the electoral success of the neo-nazi party of Golden Dawn have encouraged a racist and xenophobic rhetoric of intolerance and discriminations. This development has been taking place against the backdrop of both the economic and the refugee crisis that aggravated the already adverse representations of refugees/migrants in the media and reinforced the pre-existing anti-immigrant attitudes. Here, we will focus on hate speech; a specific discursive expression that constitutes derogatory, offensive, or abusive speech, which discriminates subjects based on particular features, such as race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and ethnicity (Warner & Hirschberg, 2012). Mass media in general and digital media in particular, constitute a favorable locus for hate speech articulation, reproduction and normalization, and will thus constitute the focus of this inquiry as well. Within this framework, this paper aims to investigate the visibility and specific characteristics of hate speech in the Greek virtual public sphere, during the 2019 European elections campaign. To that end, data from the research programme ‘Hate Speech Monitor 2019’, conducted by the Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the University of Athens will be employed. During the aforementioned electoral period, the most popular domestic online news media, as well as the online public discourse of the two most prominent -at the time- far-right parties, namely Golden Dawn and Greek Solution were monitored, in order to document expressions of hate speech. The particular types of hate speech covered included sexism, homophobia/transphobia, nationalism, racism, anti-immigrant speech. Both quantitative content and thematic analysis was applied to the final data. The findings suggest that hate speech is far from a marginal phenomenon within the Greek digital sphere, with nationalism and sexism being the most prominent categories employed. Furthermore, although the use of particular hate speech types seems to be dependent upon the nature of the websites, qualitative analysis indicates the development of specific thematic vehicles of hate speech construction and transmission that permeate the majority of the outlets under examination.