Social media platforms and the spreading of hate speech targeting sexual and gender minorities: a scoping review

Today, social media users can access various social media platforms with different characteristics that offer distinct opportunity structures for the spread of hate speech. Yet little is known about the relationship between social media platforms with their unique characteristics, including content modalities and affordances, and the spreading of hate speech towards marginalized groups, including sexual and gender minorities (LGBTQIA+). This scoping review contributes to closing this gap. We conducted a scoping review according to the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). To account for the interdisciplinary nature of hate speech research, we searched communication-specific and broad academic databases (Communication Source, Scopus, Web of Science and Academic Search Premier). The full-text database includes n = 145 full-text papers. The analysis encompassed a mixed-methods approach: Texts were manually coded for social media platforms, content modalities and affordances, and a BERTopic model was trained to identify key topics across literature. Findings show that Twitter/X was the most researched platform, followed by YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. Textual content was the most researched content modality, compared to visual and audiovisual content. Few publications explicitly mentioned platform affordances, while some pointed to anonymity and visibility as facilitators of the spreading of hate speech. Key topics revolved around the development of models and datasets for hate speech detection. Our findings call for future studies to investigate alternative platforms, visual and audiovisual content, platform affordances, and apply a research focus beyond the development of detection models to understand how platform dynamics contribute to the spreading of hate speech.