Hate speech on the Internet has reached its highest levels since the beginning of the year. According to the European Monitoring Centre, digital antisemitism, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination continue to grow. The European Commission has called on individual EU countries to strengthen the fight against online hatred, writes UNN with reference to Euronews.
Racism, antisemitism, sexism: the level of hatred and toxicity on the Internet has reached record levels since the beginning of the year. The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance has called on Sweden, Portugal, Croatia, and Latvia to take tougher measures against hate speech and online hatred.
Details
Hate speech on the global network has been growing rapidly over the past 10 years, and today it has gone off the charts, experts note.
Level of toxicity on the Internet
Experts evaluate the toxicity indicator on the Internet in four different categories – from safe (0 points) to very high (1 point).
According to the European Monitoring Centre, an average level of toxicity on the Internet has been recorded since the beginning of the year.
In April, the overall toxicity level was 0.22 points. In May of this year, digital antisemitism maintained the highest average toxicity score – 0.34.
Who suffers the most
The monitoring center is concerned about anti-Roma content on online platforms. The indicator of 0.30 shows that this community continues to be the target of attacks by Internet users. Anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Muslim statements have a significant level of toxicity – 0.29 and 0.28 points, respectively. The degree of toxicity towards refugees is 0.23 points.
Although sexist content has the lowest average toxicity score – 0.19, these insults still account for the largest number of toxic posts.
The observatory noted almost 3 million examples. This figure is three times the number of posts against Roma and more than twice the number of posts against LGBTQ+.