ISD Research Briefing: Monitoring Online Hate Speech in British Columbia

Published: 24 January 2025

This briefing provides an overview of the findings from ISD’s monitoring of hate speech targeting minority communities in Canada, namely Jewish people, Migrants, Muslims, Asian Canadians, Black people, First Nations communities and Arab Canadians, between 1 January and 31 August 2024. The focus of these findings is on both the national level in Canada, and on British Columbia in particular. The key objective of this paper is the assessment of the scale, nature and targets of hate produced by Canadian extremists online, and to complement efforts to record hate crime in the offline world.

Our findings suggest that digital anti-Muslim hate plays a more pronounced role among extremist and hate groups in B.C. than at the national level. The briefing concludes with a series of case studies of key anti-Muslim, antisemitic and anti-migrant narratives among B.C. accounts identified in our analysis, as these were the most prominent target groups of hate speech.