Abstract

The interplay between youth and social media engenders significant discourse regarding its function within a hybrid public sphere, where the boundaries between private and public domains are increasingly blurred. This phenomenon raises critical questions about the conflation of freedom and intolerance, resulting in an opaque landscape for debate and information dissemination. Consequently, there is an emergent necessity for the democratic consolidation of contemporary societies. This article—grounded in an exploratory study of the proliferation and dissemination of hate speech (HS) on social media platforms among Azorean youth during the COVID-19 pandemic—aims to achieve the following objectives: (1) to engage with key theoretical discussions surrounding the concept of HS; (2) to analyze the characteristics of the social and communicational context during the COVID-19 pandemic; and (3) to identify the challenges associated with social media usage among Azorean youth, while acknowledging its complexity as a scientific subject, particularly in terms of its operational dynamics and the meanings it ascribes to various forms of action.