AI-Powered Detection of Hate Speech Against Refugees in Turkish Social Media

Abstract

Social media platforms can cause hate speech to spread rapidly, so it is important to address such content. The speed at which hate speech spreads on social media makes it impossible to obstruct such content manually. Artificial intelligence support can be a solution for this. Detecting hate speech with artificial intelligence requires determining which expressions are hate speech. In this research, a study was conducted specifically on hate speech against refugees. Considering that Turkiye is the country with the highest migration after the Syrian Civil War, and the hospitality to approximately 3.9 Syrian people, the study focused on the Turkish language. The research first aims to create a Turkiye dataset of social media posts. Posts containing hate speech were labeled using discourse analysis on this dataset. The next stage of the research is to detect Turkish hate speech against refugees with artificial intelligence. According to the research results, the BERTurk model trained with this dataset achieved an accuracy rate of 85% in the automatic detection of Turkish hate speech. In the current climate, hate speech can spread rapidly in society and can easily lead to violent acts. Therefore, taking the necessary measures against hate speech is crucial. This study is crucial for automatically detecting hate speech in Turkish. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2025.