Study: Hate Posts on Social Media Cause Real Harm

If you're familiar with a feeling of helpless rage and frustration at vile anti-gay postings at Facebook, reader comments sections of online news outlets, and discussion threads around the Internet, you know what it's like: It feels like the sheer hate from venom-filled comments hurled across the digital medium leaves you sore and bruised. It feels, in other words, not so different from a physical attack.

It turns out that sense of harm isn't just imaginary. A new study indicates that minorities of all sorts -- including racial and sexual minorities -- suffer measurable harm when subjected to hate speech in social media.

The study is the work of researchers at Sapienza University of Rome and the Institut National de la Statistique et des �tudes �conomiques du Grand-Duch� du Luxembourg, a Sept. 3 posting at The Advocate reported.

The study, titled "Online Networks and Subjective Well-Being," purports to "test [its] hypothesis on a representative sample of the Italian population," and finds a "significantly negative correlation between online networking and well-being." The study concludes that GLBTs and other minority individuals experience "anxiety, distress, and deterioration in trust" when exposed to hate speech in threads and posts online.

It's not just the case that members of minority groups are faced with hateful messages left for a general readership by bigots; just as bad, or worse, are the effects of minorities who speak up online and are targeted for hate speech. The researchers noted a tendency for the remove of cyber-speech to strip away the veil of civility, with hate messages taking on particularly virulence.

"In online interactions, dealing with strangers who advance opposite views in an aggressive and insulting way seems to be a widespread practice, whatever the topic of discussion is," The Advocate quoted the report as saying.

The phenomenon of social media serving as a platform for anti-gay bullying among students has played a central role in the narrative about how GLBT youth suffer. But anti-gay animus affects adults, too.

Furthermore, it's not necessary for sexual minorities to encounter undisguised hate speech online for their health to suffer; previous studies have uncovered evidence to suggest that simply living in an environment where one's legal status is called into question, such as states where marriage rights have been put to a popular vote via ballot initiatives, burdens GLBT individuals with higher levels of stress and anxiety.

But even in absence of such an animosity-charged political climate, low-level and pervasive anti-gay stigma can have similar effects. In 2011, a study from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law concluded that "stigma and social inequality can increase stress and reduce well-being for LGB people, even in the absence of major traumatic events such as hate crimes and discrimination."