Violence and Hate Speech Against the Homeless in Social Media During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The aim of this work is to connect four crucial contemporary themes: violence, hate speech, extreme poverty, and Covid-19. We believe that most of the times hate speech is based on what Bourgois calls a continuum of violence, which encompasses structural, symbolic and normalized violence. In the context of this pandemic, people who live in the street are exposed to lack of attention and care from the State, a scarce treatment in the media, and also to hatred promoted by the digital comments that many citizens make when the homeless appear in different news programs, reproduced in social media through YouTube. Here we analyse digital comments made by YouTube users concerning a report from the news program Telenoche, on the free-to-air television network El Trece, on Covid-19 and extreme poverty.