Hate Speech during the Brazilian Presidential Election

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Vanessa Cortez, whose focus is on hate speech in the recent presidential election in Brazil. This election was marked by increasing polarisation and hate speech, and to study this the project gathered content around the election itself.

Hate speech attacks others for specific individual or group characteristics. This is now quite prominent on social media in Brazil. The present project gathered data from comments around 16 leading news outlets in Brazil, and used a dictionary of some 260 hate speech terms in Brazilian Portuguese to identify hateful comments.

Some 175 of these words occurred in the comments, but not all of these occurrences were genuine hate speech. After manual checking, some 80 comments were retained, and the project found that 11% of all news stories with comments had attracted hate speech comments. Some 31% of such comments were directed at the government and its representatives, but news about the government attracted a larger percentage of hate speech rather than non-government news.

The major government topics that attracted hate speech included topics like the presidential inauguration, opinion articles, gender, political debate, education, etc., but for gender, gun control, defence, and LGBTIQ+ articles generally attracted more hateful than non-hateful comments. Notably, this mirrors new Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s political propaganda.