Abstract
In the digital era, the internet and social media have transformed
communication but have also facilitated the spread of hate speech and
disinformation, leading to radicalization, polarization, and toxicity.
This is especially concerning for media outlets due to their significant
role in shaping public discourse. This study examines the topics,
sentiments, and hate prevalence in 337,807 response messages
(website comments and tweets) to news from five Spanish media outlets
(La Vanguardia, ABC, El País, El Mundo, and 20 Minutos) in January 2021.
These public reactions were originally labeled as distinct types of hate
by experts following an original procedure, and they are now classified
into three sentiment values (negative, neutral, or positive) and main
topics. The BERTopic unsupervised framework was used to extract
81 topics, manually named with the help of Large Language Models
(LLMs) and grouped into nine primary categories. Results show social
issues ( 22.22%), expressions and slang ( 20.35%), and
political issues ( 11.80%) as the most discussed. Content is
mainly negative ( 62.7%) and neutral ( 28.57%), with low
positivity ( 8.73%). Toxic narratives relate to conversation
expressions, gender, feminism, and COVID-19. Despite low levels of hate
speech ( 3.98%), the study confirms high toxicity in online
responses to social and political topics.