Are Online Haters Psychopaths? Psychological Predictors of Online Hating Behavior

Digital Hate Speech Experiences Across Age Groups and Their Impact on Well-Being: A Nationally Representative Survey in Switzerland

The growing challenge of digital hate speech requires an understanding of its complexity, scale, and impact. Research on experiencing digital hate speech has so far been limited to the roles of personal victim, observer, and perpetrator, with a focus on young people. However, research on hate crimes suggests that vicarious victimization may also be relevant due to its negative impacts. In addition, the lack of knowledge about the older generation neglects the fact that older people are increasingly seen as vulnerable to digital risks. Therefore, this study introduces vicarious victimization as an additional role in research on digital hate speech. Prevalence rates for the four roles are examined across the life span, using a nationally representative sample of adult Internet users in Switzerland. Additionally, all roles are correlated with life satisfaction and loneliness, two stable indicators of subjective well-being. The results show that in this national population, personal victimization and perpetration are less common (<7 percent), whereas observation and vicarious victimization are more common (>40 percent). Prevalence decreases with age in all roles. As expected, multivariate analyses show that both forms of victimization are negatively related to life satisfaction and positively related to loneliness, with these effects being stronger for personal victimization. Similarly, being an observer and being a perpetrator correlate negatively, but not significantly, with well-being. This study contributes to a theoretical and empirical distinction between personal and vicarious victims and provides insight into their effects on well-being in a population largely unexplored in terms of age and national representativeness.

Perception of Hate Speech by the Public and Experts: Insights into Predictors of the Perceived Hate Speech Towards Migrants

Online hate speech is a matter of concern for social media platforms, regulators, researchers, and the public. Despite its widespread prevalence and contentious nature, little research has been done on the perception of hate speech and its psychosocial predictors. To address this gap, we conducted a study on the perception of hate speech toward migrants in online comments, analyzing the differences between a public group (NPublic = 649) and an expert group (NExperts = 27) and exploring the correlation between the proposed hate speech indicators and perceived hate speech in both groups. Additionally, we explored various predictors of hate speech perception, including demographic and psychological variables such as human values, prejudice, aggression, impulsiveness, social media behavior, attitudes toward migrants and migration, and trust in institutions. Our results show that the public and experts have differing sensitivities toward hate speech, with the expert group perceiving comments as more hateful and emotionally harmful compared with the general population, who tend to agree more with antimigrant hateful comments. The proposed hate speech indicators and especially their total scores have a strong correlation with both groups' perceptions of hate speech. Psychological predictors, such as the human values of universalism, tradition, security, and subjective social distance, were significant predictors of online hate speech sensitivity. Our findings emphasize the need for public and scholarly discussions, more robust educational policies, and intervention programs with specific measures to counter hate speech online.

The Role of Victim's Resilience and Self-Esteem in Experiencing Internet Hate

Despite the growing prevalence of research on Internet hate, little is still known about the psychological factors that differentiate those who are negatively affected by being subjected to Internet hate and those who are not affected at all or only to a small degree. In the present studies, we aimed to verify if resilience and self-esteem could be predictors of such responses. A total of 60 public figures (politicians, athletes, and artists; 46.7% women) and 1128 ordinary Internet users (25.1% women) participated in the study. Participants completed The Brief Resilience Scale, The Self-Esteem Scale, and The Internet Hate Concern Scale, which was created for this study, and determined how often they experience hate online. The results showed that the public figures experience Internet hate more often but were less concerned with it than the ordinary Internet users, who received online hate less often, but were more worried about it. In both groups, high self-esteem and high resilience were negative predictors of greater concern with received online hate. Our study is the first step to understanding what makes the difference between people who cope well and are not particularly concerned, and people who are greatly affected by received Internet hate.

Defining Online Hating and Online Haters

According to a view widely held in the media and in public discourse more generally, online hating is a social problem on a global scale. However, thus far there has been little scientific literature on the subject, and, to our best knowledge, there is even no established scholarly definition of online hating and online haters in the first place. The purpose of this manuscript is to provide a new perspective on online hating by, first, distinguishing online hating from the phenomena it is often confused with, such as trolling, cyberstalking, and online hate speech, and, second, by proposing an operational definition of online hating and online haters based on ethnographic interviews and surveys of the existing scholarly literature.

Online media reveals a global problem of discarded containers as deadly traps for animals

The widespread occurrence of litter is a severe threat to global ecosystems. We have analyzed online media, to assess the diversity of animals that are prone to getting trapped in discarded containers and check which kind of containers is the most common trap for animals. A total of 503 records from around the world (51 countries, 6 continents) have been found. These include invertebrates (17 taxa, ca.1050 dead individuals), and vertebrates (98 taxa, 496 individuals including 44 carcasses). The latter group was most frequently represented by mammals (78.5% of all cases), then reptiles (15.3%), birds (1.2%), fish (1.0%) and amphibians (0.4%). Nearly 12.5% of the determined vertebrates are classified as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered, according to the IUCN. Although most trapped individuals were smaller animals, bigger ones such as monitor lizards (Varanus spp.) or large carnivores were also recorded. In most cases, animals were trapped in glass or plastic jars (32.4%), drink cans (16.5%), and steel cans (16.3%). Our results demonstrate that discarded containers can be a threat to all major groups of animals. In order to address this phenomenon, it is necessary to decrease a global production of debris, implement container deposit legislation and organize repeatable cleanup actions.