THEAnd Women are the favorite target of online hatred. The recent publication of the “Map of Inlerance”, developed by Vox – Italian Observatory on Rights, unfortunately delivered a bitter photograph of this phenomenon. Hate has never been as easy as in the digital era: from behind the screen of a computer or smartphone, protected by anonymity and physical distance, There are thousands of people who pour rivers of hatred and contempt against someone every day.
Increase hatred online
The data that emerged from the research make the chills come: on almost two million tweets analyzedbetween January and November 2024, 57% contain negative messageswhile only 4% expresses positive feelings.
An alarming figure that reflects not only the toxic climate of the network, but also the profound fractures of a society crossed by global conflicts, political tensions and populist drives. From increasingly incandescent keyboards, Hidden identities pour unprecedented violence on the net on the nettransforming social networks, from connection and sharing spaces, to arenas of verbal violence.
Main women victims of digital misogyny
Digital misogyny continues to dominate the online intolerance scene, representing 50% of the hatred content detectedincreasing compared to 43% of the previous edition.
A fact that confirms a historical trend, interrupted only in 2019, when foreign people suffered the greatest number of attacks. Hostility towards the female gender showshowever,, significant evolutionary characteristics: abandoned some traditional stereotypes, forcefully emerges an intersectional dimension of hatred. Women are, in fact, targeted with greater intensity, When they belong to ethnic or religious minorities, in particular whether foreign or Jewish.
Women who hate women
The peaks of intolerance, they have been recorded in conjunction with specific events, as the approval of the European directive against violence against womenas well as on the occasion of news regarding feminicides. The relative data is then particularly worrying to the hostility expressed by women towards other womenwhich reaches 20.81% of misogynist content.
The semantic metamorphosis of anti -Semitism
In addition to women, Anti -Semitism also stands out in clear risewith a different perspective: hatred falls in fact not on the Jew because Jewish, But as “Zionist”, that is, perceived as “aggressor, invader, genocida”. This semantic reformulation intensified above all during pro-Palestine manifestations and reached a peak in May 2024, in conjunction with university protests against Israel and with the publication of the report on the anti -Semitism of the Defamation League Anti -Semitism.
Xenophobia and Islamophobia
Not that hostility towards migrants and people of Islamic faith has decreasedIndeed, he suffered an increase compared to previous surveys. This phenomenon reflects the feeling, which crosses Italian society, so cultural diversity is often perceived as threatening. The linguistic analysis highlighted how the most recurrent insults are expressions such as “clandestines delinquent” and offenses with territorial connotations.
The geography of the Hate Speech: the identity of the haters
Geographically, The distribution of the Hate Speech presents significant territorial differences. Lombardy and Lazio are the regions with the highest rate of hatred content, while Milan and Rome share the negative primacy between the cities (both of 19.53%), followed at a distance from Naples (6.33%) and Turin (4.54%).
The territorial specialization of the phenomenon is interesting: Misoginia, xenophobia, Islamophobia and inhabism prevail in Milan, while Rome holds the primacy for anti -Semitism and homotransphobia. As for the identity of the authors of the messages, there is a clear male prevalence (31%), although for almost half of the profiles (48.1%) it was not possible to determine the genre, since it is often anonymous accounts. 92.38% of the analyzed tweets come from individual accounts.
Map of intolerance, the dimension of new hatred
Perhaps the most significant aspect that emerged from the “map of intolerance”, developed by Vox, concerns the nature of online hatred. The results confirm the thesis of feminist literature, according to which women represent the main victims of multiple discriminationin particular when the genre and xenophobia intersect. Relevant, also,, The overlap between homotransphobia and misogyny.
The data emerged from the research, given the social context marked by strong international tensions, are not very surprising. What can confirm, if anything, is that social networks therefore seem to configure Like the “transmission belt” among traditional media, politics and popular discontentfeeding a cycle of polarization and intolerance that finds its ideal culture soil in digital spaces.
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