Monitoring Targeted Hate in Online Environments
Table 3: Number of times each Swedish minister is mentioned in the comments during the time period.
['[BOLD] Name', '[BOLD] Mentions']
Obviously, the Prime Minister Stefan Löfven is the most frequently mentioned politician, with more than 10,000 mentions during the analyzed period. The second most mentioned politician in the studies data is Morgan Johansson, the Swedish Minister of Justice and Home Affairs, and the third most mentioned minister is Margot Wallström, Minister for Foreign Affairs. As we noted in the last section, expressions of hate seem to correlate with frequency of mention (at least in the data we have studied). On the other hand, counting proportions, as we do in the right part of the figure, risks overestimating the significance of very rare events. A perhaps more useful measure might be to calculate deviations from the expected amount of hateful comments for each minister. As an example, Morgan Johansson is mentioned 3 142 by his full name in our data. Looking at the actual frequency counts, we see that 3 mentions contain swearwords, 8 contain anger, 14 contain naughtiness, and 5 contain general threat. For the last three categories, the actual counts are much higher than would be expected, indicating that these are significant measurements.