Hate speech in e-sports primarily motivated by sexism
Using a data set of Twitch, Instagram and Twitter posts, ARAG insurance and Signify analysed hate speech in e-sports. The data set of 5.5 million posts shows: Only just under one per cent of interactions were abusive, but almost half of these were motivated by sexism or homophobia.
ARAG Insurance and the Signify Technology Group have conducted a study on the topic of hate speech in e-sports. According to the authors, the results were surprising, with significantly fewer hate comments than expected: Within three months, around 5.5 million posts and comments on the content of 250 e-athletes on Twitch, Instagram and Twitter were analysed. According to the study, this included 52,000 allegedly abusive posts and 1,400 clearly abusive posts, which corresponds to less than one per cent. Of the abusive posts, ten per cent also contained content glorifying violence. The study emphasises that so-called pile-ons, snowball effects in which posters of hate content confirmed and incited each other, occurred primarily in live twitch chats. The authors emphasise chat moderation as an effective countermeasure.