Sweden, City of Malmö, Swedish Center for Preventing Violent Extremism (CVE) Nordic Safe Cities, Common Consultancy, Analyse & Tal (2022), A safe and secure digital city - Malmö, October 2022.

Country

Sweden

Title

Sweden, City of Malmö, Swedish Center for Preventing Violent Extremism (CVE) Nordic Safe Cities, Common Consultancy, Analyse & Tal (2022), A safe and secure digital city - Malmö, October 2022.

View full research

Year

2022

Publication type

Research evidence/report

Geographical coverage

Local

Area/location of interest

SE224 - Skåne län

Type of Institution

Public authority

Institution

Sweden, City of Malmö, Swedish Center for Preventing Violent Extremism (CVE) Nordic Safe Cities, Common Consultancy, Analyse & Tal

Thematic focus

Hate crime Racism & xenophobia Hate speech: Public incitement to hatred or violence

Groups

General population

Key findings

The result of the analysis shows what online hate looks like in Malmö. The analysis demonstrates that the hate thriving online is often linked to incidents occurring in the physical environment. In general, hate is more prevalent on Flashback than on Facebook. On Facebook, hate is mainly found on pages related to politics and news. On Flashback, discussions about crime generate the most hate. The analysis shows that most of the hate is directed at people with an ethno-religious minority background. Furthermore, the majority of the ethno-religious hate is “Islamophobic” or anti-Muslim, but Jewish people (in the form of anti-Semitic ideas), Afro-Swedes, and LGBTQIA+ individuals are also frequent victims of hate. “Islamophobia”, or anti-Muslim racism, is expressed in various ways and directed at religion, ethnicity, nationality, or cultural traits.

Methodology (Qualitative/Quantitative and exact type used, questionnaires etc)

The analysis in the project is based on certain methodological foundations, and the results are derived from several considerations. The project utilizes a language algorithm that has been trained to identify and classify hate speech using artificial intelligence (AI). The technique and methodology developed are open-source, making them available to other actors who wish to use and/or further develop it within their local context. The platforms selected for the project were Facebook and Flashback. Malmö is geographically tagged on Facebook, meaning that the approximately 700 pages and groups initially identified through various searches and subsequently analyzed can be definitively tied to Malmö geographically. However, Malmö on Flashback is not geographically tagged, which means that the approximately 400 threads containing 'Malmö' in their title, which were identified and analyzed, cannot be fully tied to Malmö geographically, but instead represent the narrative surrounding Malmö.

Sample details and representativeness

Facebook is the largest discussion platform in Malmö, with 74 percent of all Swedes using it. It hosts around 700 pages and groups discussing Malmö. Flashback is the platform where the most openly hateful discourse occurs in and about Malmö, with 32 percent of Swedes using the forum. It features over 450 threads discussing Malmö. The project’s so-called hate algorithm is built on machine learning and is based on 31,500 comments from Facebook and Flashback, which have been manually coded by a group of native Swedish speakers. A Swedish language model was used, meaning the algorithm can only identify hate expressed in Swedish. The data used in the project was collected between 1 January 2019 and 28 February 2022. The data was gathered both through Facebook’s GRAPH API and through scraping. On Facebook, the data is based on anonymised posts, comments, and reactions. On Flashback, the data consists of published posts by anonymous user identities in different threads about Malmö.

DISCLAIMERThe information presented here is collected under contract by the FRA's research network FRANET. The information and views contained do not necessarily reflect the views or the official position of the FRA.