Central European Journal of Communication
Detecting and Categorizing Islamophobic Hate Speech on Spanish Twitter/X
Islamophobic hate speech on social media includes overt toxicity and contextual frames that associate Muslims with invasion, criminality, cultural threat, or racialized exclusion. This study examines 21,326 Spanish-language tweets about Islam and Muslims posted in Spain between 2010 and 2022. We combine human annotation, exploratory discursive coding, Perspective API scores, and a multilingual BERT classifier. Human coders classified 28.2% of tweets as Islamophobic hate speech. Explicit hostility was the most frequ …