During the Council of Europe’s No Hate Speech Week 2025, ERGO Network co-hosted the workshop “Reporting and countering hate speech with young people” in collaboration with APICE (Agenzia Di Promozione Integrata Per I Cittadini In Europa) and the No Hate Speech Movement – Italy. This session was part of the official programme marking the International Day for Countering Hate Speech, with a specific focus on systemic antigypsyism and its manifestations online.
Mihai Oancea from ERGO Network presented insights from the Together Against Antigypsyism Online (TAAO) project. This EU-funded initiative focuses on monitoring and countering online hate speech targeting Roma communities across Europe.
Roma Youth at the Centre of Digital Advocacy
Mihai’s intervention emphasized the importance of involving Roma youth in building effective, community-led responses to hate speech. As he noted in his presentation, “TAAO is not just about reporting online hate – it’s about empowering Roma youth to lead the response, advocate for their rights, and shift the narrative.”
TAAO combines community-based monitoring, strategic counter-action, and local capacity-building across seven countries: Romania, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Belgium.
Between October and December 2024 alone, young Roma monitors trained by the project documented 734 cases of online antigypsyist hate speech. Most of these were coded, using irony, pseudo-scientific claims or so-called “reverse racism” arguments to evade content moderation. The hate was most often directed at Roma people in connection with crime, poverty or political participation, and was particularly intense in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary.
Naming the Hate: Examples from the Field
Mihai presented case studies from several countries, illustrating how online antigypsyism appears across different platforms:
- Bulgaria: An AI-generated racist video mocking Roma on public transport gained 12,000 views on YouTube within three weeks – and was never taken down.
- Czech Republic: An Instagram reel titled “How I wake up knowing I’m not a gypsy” reached 2.9 million views and generated thousands of hateful comments.
- Romania: A Facebook post described Roma as “thieves and crooks… filthy crows” – and was only removed after formal reporting.
- Slovakia: Facebook sale groups openly posted that “Roma should not contact” sellers when offering animals, reinforcing local exclusion and segregation.
Participants in the session were invited to reflect on where to draw the line between opinion and hate. One example, shown during the presentation, read: “It is clearly evident that the universal right to vote leads to this. This must be the first thing to be abolished, and after that, it will be easier to stop the breeding of Roma.”
This statement is a clear example of hate speech because it goes beyond expressing a political opinion – it calls for the removal of fundamental rights and uses dehumanising language (“breeding of Roma”), which evokes racial purity narratives. Such language promotes discrimination and exclusion, and incites hostility towards an entire ethnic group.
From Monitoring to Action: Next Steps
The session ended with a call for collective responsibility: “Antigypsyist hate online isn’t inevitable; it is engineered, encouraged, and left unchecked. But it can be unmade – with facts, tools, and collective voices.”
Looking forward, ERGO Network and TAAO partners will continue to:
- Train and support young Roma monitors
- Improve the usability of monitoring tools and country-specific guidance
- Push social media platforms to take responsibility and explicitly include antigypsyism in content moderation
- Share findings with journalists, educators and policymakers to build pressure for change
- Equip local NGOs and youth groups with resources to develop counter-narratives and rights education
