Discriminatory Expressions, the Young and Social Networks: The Effect of Gender

In the framework of the «Project I: CUD» (Internet: Creatively Unveiling Discrimination), carried out in the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, Romania and Spain, we have studied the expressions of discrimination used by young people when surfing social network sites (SNS). We designed a methodological strategy for detecting discriminatory content in 493 Facebook profiles and we collected 363 examples for further analysis. Our goal was to compile information about types of discriminatory content and how they work online, and to create tools and strategies so that trainers, teachers and families can fight against discrimination on the Net. As a result, we detected different patterns between young men and women, which reveal that they behave differently on Internet and express discrimination in different ways on SNS. Men tend to be more direct: they post and share messages that are clearly more discriminatory and which focus on ethnic groups and cultural minorities. Women, on the other hand, tend to be indirect: they are less obviously discriminatory (reactive) and focus on sociocultural status and physical appearance.