Catalyst of hate? Ethnic insulting on YouTube in the aftermath of terror attacks in France, Germany and the United Kingdom 2014–2017

In the last 20 years, several major terror attacks conducted in name of political Islam hit Western Europe. We examine impact such on hostile behaviour social media from a cross-national perspective. To this end, we draw upon time-stamped, behavioural data YouTube and focus frequency popularity (‘likes’) ethnically insulting comments among corpus approximately one hundred thousand comments. study aggregate change use individual-level panel to investigate within-user ethnic periods leading up following events Germany, France UK. Results indicate that boost interest immigration-related topics general, lead disproportional increase hate speech particular. Moreover, find attack effects spill over other countries several, but not all, instances. Deeper analyses suggest, however, pattern is mainly driven by changes composition users changing individual users. That is, surge comes hateful newly entering online discussions, rather than previous becoming more an attack.