Amnesty International Norge

Negative attitudes and stereotypes about the Sami on Facebook

The Sami in Norway have a long history of oppression and discrimination. Today, the Sámi are recognised as an indigenous people, which gives them rights that, among other things, ensure minority protection and counteract discrimination. At the same time, we know from previous surveys that many people have little knowledge of the Sami as a people group, and that the Sami are four times more likely to experience discrimination than the majority population. Three out of four young Sámi have experienced discrimination because they are Sámi. Much of this is expressed on social media, such as Facebook.

The report is based on a desire to contribute to more knowledge about the extent of negative attitudes and stereotypes that are shared about the Sami on social media. ‘This is an important area to investigate, in addition to hate speech. These are often opinions and statements that are within the bounds of freedom of expression, but which can nevertheless be perceived as very damaging to the group being discussed. It also pushes the boundaries of what we still consider acceptable and as truths about a vulnerable minority group.

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This is how we did it

To answer the question of how the Sámi are referred to on social media, we have collected and systematised hundreds of thousands of Facebook posts and comments about the Sámi and Sámi topics.

We have analysed political party Facebook pages, Norwegian media Facebook pages and Facebook groups. The groups were selected based on relevant themes and geographical location.

To gain a deeper insight into the debate on politicians' and the media's Facebook pages, we read and coded around 20 per cent of all Facebook comments that mention Sami themes. In other words, 7,600 comments.

To measure the debate in the groups, we trained the language model GPT-4 to classify comments based on the manual coding we have done.

This is what we found

Debates on Sámi topics on Facebook are characterised by negative attitudes and stereotypes. When Sámi issues are discussed and specifically mentioned in comments on the Facebook pages of media outlets and politicians, at least one in four comments contains negative attitudes or stereotypical representations of the Sámi.

The Fosen case increases the volume of mentions and the proportion of negative comments in the media's comments section. In connection with the Fosen case, the proportion of comments conveying negative attitudes and stereotypes increased by almost 10% in the first half of 2023. The biggest increase in the proportion of negative comments is in the comments section of national media.

The most common negative attitude about the Sámi is that the Sámi are an obstacle to progress and modern development, which is particularly linked to the discussion about the Fosen case and whether the wind turbines should be removed. The second most common negative attitude about the Sami in the comment fields is that ‘the Sami cannot be considered an indigenous people’. The statement that the Sami's indigenous status is illegitimate is used as an argument against Sami rights.