With regard to empirical evidence, a small handful of studies have begun to
systematically evaluate the prevalence of hate speech on online platforms,
though more work is needed. Analyzing the popularity of hate speech in more
than 750 million political tweets and in 400 million tweets sent by a random
sample of American Twitter users between June 2015 and June 2017, Siegel
et al. (2020) ﬁnd that, even on the most proliﬁc days, only a fraction of
a percentage of tweets in the American Twittersphere contain hate speech.
Similarly, studying the popularity of hate speech on Ethiopian Facebook
pages, Gagliardone et al. (2016) ﬁnd that only 0.4 percent of statements in
their representative sample were classiﬁed as hate speech, and 0.3 percent of
tweets were classiﬁed as dangerous speech, which directly or indirectly calls for
violence against a particular group.
Social_Media_and_Democracy