According to the EU Statistics Agency, the most common encounter with hateful and derogatory online messages is for young Estonians.
Finland ranks at the top of the list when young people in EU countries are asked about hateful and degrading messages on the Internet.
About half of EU 16-29 year olds say they have encountered hateful or derogatory messages online, says the EU statistical agency Eurostat.
The survey conducted in 2023 was aimed at young people who had used the Internet in the last three months. Data are available for 23 EU countries.
Estonia tops the list
The number one on the list is Estonia, where 69 percent of young people said that they had come across internet messages with a hostile or derogatory attitude towards a group of people or an individual.
Next were Denmark and Finland, where the percentage was 68 in both.
At the bottom of the list were Croatia and Romania, where about a quarter of the respondents answered that they had encountered hateful messages. In Bulgaria, the share was just under a third.
Political opinions under attack
According to Eurostat, the most common target of hateful or derogatory messages was political or social opinions.
More than a third of the young people who responded to the survey named political and social opinions as the reason for hateful messages. In Finland, 56 percent of respondents felt this way.
According to young people, the second most common target of hateful messages was sexual orientation. The third was ethnic reasons.