ACID: On the Perception of Online Classism

Arianna Muti, Elisa Bassignana, Amanda Cercas Curry, Federica Durante, Dirk Hovy, Debora Nozza


Abstract
Socioeconomic status (SES) structures social inequality and underlies class-based discrimination that is often rationalised through stereotypes expressed in public discourse. However, despite extensive research on hate speech detection in Natural Language Processing, classism detection remains an underexplored phenomenon. We introduce ACID, a cross-cultural corpus with over 1.15 million instances, to investigate classism across YouTube and Twitter from 14 English-speaking countries. We examine (i) which stereotypes are invoked towards lower-SES, (ii) whether blame for lower-SES is attributed to individuals or structural factors, and (iii) whether these people are portrayed offensively. Across platforms, explanations are predominantly framed in terms of individual responsibility. Across countries, class stereotypes consistently revolve around moralized notions of dependency, laziness, and ignorance, revealing a shared global structure of class-based stigma. Our dataset and analysis are a foundation to advance research on class-based discrimination and its representation in online discourse.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.857
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
10953–10969
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-857
DOI:
10.63317/2myisgn9aju6
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arianna Muti, Elisa Bassignana, Amanda Cercas Curry, Federica Durante, Dirk Hovy, and Debora Nozza. 2026. ACID: On the Perception of Online Classism. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 10953–10969, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
ACID: On the Perception of Online Classism (Muti et al., LREC 2026)
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