Hate speech on social media: behaviour of Portuguese football fans on Facebook.

This article examines how Facebook is shaping the nature of hate speech. The observation field is the Facebook pages of the 18 Portuguese football clubs of the Portuguese League – the main professional competition in the country. Data extraction was performed automatically via Facebook Graph API in the first three months of the 2020/2021 season. The analysed dataset has 5,192 publications and 276,231 fan comments, which registered over 5 million reactions (like, haha, love, sad, wow, etc.). The findings reveal that the volume of hate speech material on Facebook pages has a low incidence. In any case, the most significant comments are racists, xenophobes, and regional antagonisms. These cases are also the ones that have attracted the most reactions from fans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]