Marrakech – The mass entry of migrants into the occupied city of Ceuta on July 30 and 31 produced nearly 9,600 hate messages on Spanish social media within 48 hours, according to the latest bulletin from the Iberian country’s Observatory of Racism and Xenophobia (OBERAXE).
The observatory, attached to the Secretary of State for Migration, recorded 9,590 hate messages tied to those two days alone. RTVE reported that some 80,000 migrants entered the city during that period.
Across the full month of July, the FARO monitoring system detected 57,406 pieces of hate speech and discriminatory content on social media. That figure marked a rise from the 40,800 flagged in June, driven mainly by the peaks recorded after the Ceuta entry.
OBERAXE director Tomás Fernández Villazala pointed to the role of platforms during such moments. In isolated crises where hate speech spreads exponentially online, he warned, users must avoid sharing these messages to prevent their virality, while the removal of xenophobic and racist content by digital platforms remains crucial.
The removal rate reached 70% in July, a nine-point increase over June. Platforms took down 12% of messages reported by ordinary users, up from 10% the previous month. Of the content removed, 9% was deleted within the first 24 hours, another 1% within 48 hours, and 2% during the first week.
The trusted flagger channel proved far more effective, accounting for the removal of 58% of reported content, seven points higher than in June. OBERAXE tied that improvement to sustained coordination with platforms through working groups, bilateral meetings, and direct communication channels.
By platform, X posted the highest removal rate at 93%, followed by TikTok at 88%, Facebook at 74%, and Instagram at 71%. YouTube trailed far behind, removing just 14% of reported comments. Instagram more than doubled its rate from the previous month.
People from North Africa remained the main target of the hate speech, concentrating 68% of the content analyzed. Though below June’s level, the share stayed high and reflected the persistence of hostile narratives toward this group. Generic references to immigrants drew 19%, Muslims 16%, people of African descent 10%, and Latin Americans 7%.
In terms of tone, 40% of the messages dehumanized or gravely degraded their targets, while 38% framed these groups as a threat, up from the prior month. Messages inciting expulsion made up 15%, and those inciting violence 4%. Another 2% sought to discredit the groups, and 1% praised those who attack them.
Explicit aggressive language, marked by insults, threats, and direct slurs, appeared in 60% of the content. Irony or sarcasm featured in 34%, and 33% relied on images, videos, memes, or coded language that complicate automatic detection.
Citizen insecurity drove the largest share of hate content at 48%, through narratives linking crime to migrants. Sports accounted for 34%, as the 2026 World Cup generated racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic messages aimed at players, national teams, and fans.
Migration-related public policy made up 17%, including debates over extraordinary regularization and the EU Migration and Asylum Pact.
Content referencing sexual assault represented 5% of the total, terrorism 4%, and boat arrivals 1%. OBERAXE expects the Ceuta entry to again dominate its August bulletin.
The Ceuta hate wave is not a spontaneous eruption but the harvest of a deliberate ideological project. Spain’s far right feeds on a manufactured historical panic: the migrant recast as the returning Moor, the crossing recast as a second Islamic conquest of Iberia. This is Reconquista nostalgia weaponized for electoral gain, dressing bigotry in the costume of civilizational defense.
By fusing crime, faith, and origin into a single threatening silhouette, these movements convert social anxiety into votes and North Africans into permanent suspects. The mentality is neither new nor accidental; it is medieval grievance repackaged as modern politics, profitable, cynical, and corrosive to any pretense of European democratic decency.
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