Entitlement Racism on YouTube: White injury—the licence to Humiliate Roma migrants in the UK

Abstract

Hate speech monitoring has become a challenging task for social media platforms. While efforts have been made to combat racism and other forms of hate speech, marginalised communities, such as the Roma are frequent targets of intense discrimination and online racist abuse. This article examines manifestations of Romaphobia, also known as anti-Roma racism, on YouTube in the context of 2016 UK Referendum on EU membership, when Roma along with other Eastern European migrants became demonized in the right-wing narratives of Brexit supporters. Drawing on Thematic Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, the article provides an in-depth account of how Romaphobia is discursively constructed in the commentaries of those watching YouTube documentaries about Eastern European migrants. In addition to drawing attention to various forms of overt and covert racism that fly under the radar in the content moderation process, the analysis shows that ‘entitlement racism’ is gradually becoming normalised in social media, with anti-Roma racism acquiring alarming levels of verbal violence which needs immediate attention.