With more social media influencers getting established, and more and more people posting bigger parts of their life online, the comments, criticism and hate are rife.

Nearly 1 in 4 adults in the UK have experienced some kind of online abuse.

In a local scenario, a 2018 Eurobarometer study revealed that Maltese are more likely to encounter hate speech online than residents of any other.

Prof. Gordon Sammut from the Department of Cognitive Science at the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences (MaKS) was recently featured in a BBC online documentary, titled ‘How quickly can online hate spread?’

He spoke to interviewer Zara McDermott about everyday extremism, which is the increasing presence of extremist messages and symbols in people’s everyday lives. These manifest through a notable upsurge in visual artefacts laced with extremist ideology in online and offline spaces.

Prof. Sammut is developing a test to see how prone any individual would be to it. The test involves rating a number of statements from 0 to 4, based on how extreme an individual deems them to be.

The film was made with the Open University.

The video can be viewed via this online page.