Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime

Abstract

This paper investigates the link between social media and hate crime. We show that anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook predicts crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage. To establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation in major Facebook and internet outages, which fully undo the correlation between social media and hate crime. We further find that the effect decreases with distracting news events; increases with user network interactions; and does not hold for posts unrelated to refugees. Our results suggest that social media can act as a propagation mechanism between online messages and violent crime.

Keywords: social media, hate crime, minorities, Germany, AfD

JEL Classification: D74, J15, Z10, D72, O35