The next speaker at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Javier Amores, whose focus is on toxicity, hate speech, and engagement in Spanish parties’ tweets about gender and sexuality. Sexual and gender identity, sexual freedom, and related topics have been a matter of considerable debate in Spain, even though Spain has made great advances in liberalisation and inclusivity in recent years; there is a need to examine how this has affected how parties communicate about these issues on social media platforms, and what engagement this produces.
This project explores this for tweets between 2015 and 2023; it gathered some 265,000 tweets from the official accounts of the major Spanish parties, and filtered this for the 4,500 tweets which addressed gender and sexuality in some way. These were unevenly distributed across the various parties, with the Socialist and People’s Parties posting the most. They were computationally coded for their sentiment, for their level and type of toxicity, and for the presence of gendered or sexualised hate speech.
The more progressive parties in Spain posted more on gender and sexual identity overall, but the far-right Vox party was also notably active. Vox had far higher levels of engagement and interaction overall. Volume of such tweets increased over time, as did engagement, with peaks in the late 2010s and early 2020s; sentiment is getting more negative over the time period, and the most recent years show more toxicity and hate speech.
Sentiment in Vox posts was considerably more negative, while only the posts by the progressive Sumar party showed positive sentiment scores on average. Vox and the Catalonian ERC also led the field on hate speech and toxicity. More negative sentiment, more toxicity, and more hate speech generally produced higher engagement, while more positive sentiment produced lower engagement.
