Every month , in Italy,
5,300 contents with homophobic insults
are published online
.
And
during the month of Pride
, they rise to
6,600
(about 25% more).
During the month of Pride, Dentsu Italia analyzed the scenario of digital conversations in reference to hateful words and the 20 most frequent insults referred to the LGBTQ + community, to identify the distortions of thought, bias and paranoia of Italians.
The paper analyzes the volumes of the phenomenon by listening to the network, and reports by way of example only 50 different messages of hate, identified within the main social and digital channels and selected from the over 280,000 messages traced during the research.
Dentsu's research, carried out on the Brandwatch web monitoring platform, is the result of a mapping of online conversations (on news sites, blogs, forums and social media) within which homophobic insults were publicly recorded in the period from January 1, 2018 to May 31, 2022. At the same time, a quantitative sample analysis was also conducted of homophobic comments addressed to TikTok users who are admittedly LGBTQ +, as well as homophobia carried within the main LGBTQ + dating apps.
Together with the numbers dedicated to the dimensions of hate,
the paper also reveals that 40% of users who promote hate speech against LGBTQ + people are female.
The channel on which the highest percentage of conversations is concentrated is Twitter (63%) with a rather compact “underground current” that also crosses blogs, forums, news sites and Tumblr.
"We wanted to produce a paper that would allow the reader to immerse themselves not only in the malaise of violent and offensive communication, but also to reflect on the wrong weight we give to words, masking fragility with self-irony and confusing non-respect for others with 'a sense of humor' - comments Ilaria Affer, Social Impact Director of dentsu italia - “What we photograph in this document is not a phenomenon limited to the month of Pride: LGBTQ + people, but also straight people, live daily immersed in this world of gratuitous insults and stereotyped labels.
To think that it is only words is to close our eyes to the power that language has in influencing us and in defining in return what kind of image we have of ourselves ".