United NationsThirteenth Session of the Forum on Minority Issues Hate Speech, Social Media and Minorities Geneva, November 19th-20th, 2020 Agenda item: Causes, scale and impact of hate speech targeting minorities on social media Intervention of the Catalan National Assembly (Civil Society Organization) My name is Carles Fité and I speak on behalf of the Catalan National Assembly, a grass-roots organization defending the right to self-determination of the Catalan national minority. Theuse of hate speech against Catalan population is spreading in Spain, a trend known as Catalanophobia. This hatred is not new, but a historical constant throughout centuries, with the goal of portraying Catalans as disloyal people who had betrayed Spanish state-building. Since 2017 Spanish authorities have launched a systematic campaign of repression against the Catalan movement for self-determination, including the persecution of 2,850 activists and representatives, and the imprisonment of 9 civil and political leaders. Human rights violations that have been denounced by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and Amnesty International, among others. In the same vein, Spanish media have been often portraying Catalans negatively, using adjectives such as terrorists, supremacists, racists or treacherous. Dehumanization paved the way to more violent statements, especially in social media. This growth of hate speech has been denounced recently by a report elaborated by the Law Clinic Aix Global Justice, mentioning cases of harassment and violence by Spanish far-right supporters, discrimination to Catalan speakers by public officials or the ban of symbols supporting the Catalan political prisoners. The report also analysed social media messages in Spain during a period in 2020, in which of the one hundred and thirty thousand conversations in Twitter analyzed that mentioned "Cataluña", nothing less than a 33% had a negative connotation.