Hate speech targeting the ministers of Sanna Marin’s cabinet in Twitter

Authors

• Jari-Mikko Meriläinen Jyväskylän yliopiston kauppakorkeakoulu

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33352/prlg.122025

Keywords:

cyberbullying, e-democracy, hate speech, online communication, Twitter

Abstract

This study uses a large, manually classified sample of Tweets for examining hate speech targeting the ministers of the cabinet of Sanna Marin. The research objective is to estimate the relative frequency of hate speech. In addition, I investigate the distribution of hate speech by gender, age, and political party. Moreover, I examine friend lists and likes of those users that participate to hate speech. The results suggest that hate speech targeting ministers is, on average, common because about every twentieth tweet is hateful. It is likely that the composition of the cabinet of ministers affects the distribution of hate speech. Hence, the results cannot be directly interpreted as proof for or against gendered hate speech. Nonetheless, the descriptive statistics and regressions results do not suggest that the likelihood to receive hate speech is higher for female ministers. Hate speech targeting Marin’s cabinet is sent by followers of the Finns party. 90 percent of sample users do not participate to hate speech. Excluding that, hate speech is not very concentrated.