INACH annual report 2017 – 2018

This report dives into the data collection of INACH and its members of the last year, which in turn leads to the establishment of trends within the field of cyber hate. Those are the following;

The top four hate types are the following: Racism at 21.26%, a minor drop from last year’s 22.19%, antisemitism at 19.99%, also a minor drop from 21.38%, anti-Muslim hate (i.e. Islamophobia) at 16.37%, another minor drop from 17.98% and finally antirefugee hate with a larger drop from 15.18% to 11,30%.

The bottom four hate types (none of which reach 10% of the totality of hate types) are the following: xenophobia (6.96%), observing a minute rise from 5.85% last year, antiArab racism (7.15%) that also rose from 5.23%, homophobia (3.28%) that virtually stayed at the same level as in our previous Report (3.08%) and anti-Roma hate (i.e. antiZiganism) (1.39%) that also hardly changed from 1.46%.

Concerning the Web 1.0 platforms, their ratio has slightly dropped from the previous year, which means that now less than three quarters of all complaints registered on Web 1.0 platforms by our partners were registered on websites (69.26%). They are still followed by forums (25.36%) that have seen a major rise since last year’s 14.92%, and blogs that observed a medium drop from 9.87% to 5.38%. This means that of all cases on older type platforms, more than a quarter were recorded on forums, a major 10 per cent rise.

Regarding Web 2.0 platforms, the first of the three main platforms is Facebook whose ratio has risen slightly even further from 42.39% to 43.98% keeping its first place from last year. There has been a change though in the second place, where YouTube has taken over Twitter due to Twitter’s substantial fall from 24.1% to 17.81%, whilst YouTube virtually stayed at the same level (21.63% this year and 21.35% in the last).

About the legality of instances of cyber hate, the absolute majority of collected cases were deemed illegal by our partners (70.86%), a 10 per cent drop from last year (81.38%). Yet, almost 30 per cent of instances of online hate speech fall outside of national laws, international directives and EU framework.

In regard to the removal rates, in 2016-2017 websites removed 52.36 per cent of content which has gotten slightly better this year, with a removal rate of almost 58 per cent. The biggest shift observed was regarding blogs and forums. These removed 56.86% and 23.64% of cases respectively in the last year. This year forums removed 71%, whilst blogs removed 21.21%. Concerning social media, Facebook removed 60.16% of cases, a five per cent fall from last year (65.05%), Twitter only removed 51.48%, another major decrease from last year’s 59.26%, and YouTube is the only one that managed to not just maintain its fairly acceptable removal rate of 74.43% from last year, but it even managed to raise it by more than 1.5% to 76%.

This report will give an in-depth analysis of the causes and consequences of those trends.