Analysing YouTube Reactions to Femicide News: A Case Study in the Spanish Context

In 2024, an EU survey, involving 114,023 women aged between 18 and 74 from all 27 member states, revealed that one out of three of them experienced some form of violence from the age of 15. Taking this alarming situation into account, in this contribution we intend to investigate and analyse Gender-Based Violence (GBV), specifically focusing on femicide, which is considered the apex of this kind of violence and its most brutal expression. Our research consists of collecting and analyzing a sample of people’s reactions to femicide news. In particular, we gathered YouTube comments to femicide cases in the Spanish context and analysed them from a qualitative point of view, highlighting linguistic patterns, users’ position and awareness through an established fine-grained schema. As GBV is a recurring topic of study in different fields and from different perspectives, in this contribution we have adopted an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the phenomenon, combining Natural Language Processing (NLP) methodology for the collection of data and linguistic expertise for the qualitative analysis of the gathered data.