Exploring Hate Speech Perpetrators' Profiles on X: An Analysis of User Replies to Spanish Digital News Media Publications

Hate speech on the social media platform X has transformed the reply sections of digital news media accounts into contested arenas for democratic discourse. Although research on hate speech is extensive, the systematic characterization of the disseminators who target authoritative news profiles on social platforms remains underexplored. This study examines the propagation patterns of hate speech in reply threads on X for Spanish digital news media accounts, analyzing coordinated user behavior. An analysis of over one million messages from five major Spanish outlets (January 2021) identified 2243 accounts responsible for 10,567 hate expressions. Social network analysis employing modularity metrics, eigenvector centrality, and temporal synchronization coefficients revealed coordinated behavioral patterns. Hate speech predominantly targets political actors, media outlets, and journalists rather than marginalized groups. Perpetrators exhibit nano‐influencer profiles (approximately 1000 followers) with highly synchronized temporal activity ( R ≈ 0.999) and cohesive network structures (modularity 0.572–0.693). These characteristics suggest coordinated amplification strategies that exploit the media's editorial authority on X to legitimize toxic narratives. The concept of “hostile gatewatching” describes how nano‐influencers leverage the perceived legitimacy of official news accounts to amplify hate speech within public replies while circumventing platform moderation systems. These findings inform structural moderation policies targeting high‐centrality nodes and temporal coordination patterns, thereby enhancing the integrity of digital discourse.