Aporophobia: An Overlooked Type of Toxic Language Targeting the Poor

Svetlana Kiritchenko, Georgina Curto Rex, Isar Nejadgholi, Kathleen C. Fraser


Abstract
While many types of hate speech and online toxicity have been the focus of extensive research in NLP, toxic language stigmatizing poor people has been mostly disregarded. Yet, aporophobia, a social bias against the poor, is a common phenomenon online, which can be psychologically damaging as well as hindering poverty reduction policy measures. We demonstrate that aporophobic attitudes are indeed present in social media and argue that the existing NLP datasets and models are inadequate to effectively address this problem. Efforts toward designing specialized resources and novel socio-technical mechanisms for confronting aporophobia are needed.
Anthology ID:
2023.woah-1.12
Volume:
The 7th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Yi-ling Chung, Paul R{\"ottger}, Debora Nozza, Zeerak Talat, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani
Venue:
WOAH
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
113–125
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.woah-1.12
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.woah-1.12
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Svetlana Kiritchenko, Georgina Curto Rex, Isar Nejadgholi, and Kathleen C. Fraser. 2023. Aporophobia: An Overlooked Type of Toxic Language Targeting the Poor. In The 7th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH), pages 113–125, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Aporophobia: An Overlooked Type of Toxic Language Targeting the Poor (Kiritchenko et al., WOAH 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2023.woah-1.12.pdf