# Cultural Targets, Structural Frames, Binding Morals: A Cross-Lingual Audit of Online Hate in Multicultural Singapore

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21996 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21996/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Manufactured Divisiveness: Decomposing the Hostile Content of Seven Social Media Influence Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14491/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multicultural Singapore hosts overlapping language publics (English, Chinese, and Malay) that discuss the same out-groups in parallel, a natural setting to ask whether online hate shares a structure across languages and whether what a community textitproduces is what it textitamplifies. From a Singapore-centric 2025 Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube corpus (31.0M items; 1.76M comments mentioning eleven identity groups), we benchmark eight open large language models as hate annotators against a human-adjudicated gold set, adopt the best (Phi-4: accuracy 0.95, Cohen's kappa=0.91, recall 1.00 on an independent manual check), and replicate every finding under a second model. The results converge on one thesis, textitlayered cultural contingency: cross-lingual divergence falls monotonically as one moves from what a community hates to how and why it hates. Which out-groups are targeted is culturally specific (language × target V=0.25), but the threat frames and the binding moral grammar of hate (sanctity and loyalty, 55-75%, not fairness) are far more shared across languages, with divergence dropping to V=0.08 for moral foundations and 0.07 for emotion. Hate is contempt-driven and voices an out-group, anti-immigration grievance rather than an anti-system one. Reception is selectively nativist: hateful comments are amplified less than neutral mentions overall, yet anti-immigrant hate is preferentially amplified while religious and anti-LGBTQ hate is not, and volume does not track 2025 Singapore key events. We further show that absolute hate prevalence is not well defined at the LLM-annotator level, with agreement ceilings at kappa≈0.42 across models, so we report relative structure as primary. The findings bear directly on cross-lingual content moderation.