Aporophobia: An Overlooked Type of Toxic Language Targeting the Poor
Appeared In: ACL Anthology
Publication Date: July 2023
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. The authors 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.
Kiritchenko, S., Curto, G., Nejadgholi, I., and Fraser, K. 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.