Hate speech in digital social networks: types and forms of intolerance on Jair Bolsonaro’s Facebook page

Abstract

This paper aims to present a description of the hate speech on Jair Bolsonaro’s fanpage between 2013 and 2016 — period when the parliamentarian manifested interest in running for president in the 2018 election. The methodological procedures required articulation of data mining methods and techniques, statistics and Content Analysis (CA) of 3,819,909 comments. Data extraction was performed by Netvizz and a software was developed exclusively for the textual mining of this research. The CA verified the sorts of hate speech on the webpage and the way interactants expressed intolerance. The results showed a significant increase in hatred between the years observed, with emphasis on political orientation, gender, LGBTphobic and xenophobic hatred. The most recurrent manifestation forms were insults and curses, accusations, stereotyping and generalizations, feelings of superiority and threats.

Keywords
hate speech; Jair Bolsonaro; digital social networks; Facebook