Tackling Social Bias against the Poor: a Dataset and a Taxonomy on Aporophobia

Georgina Curto, Svetlana Kiritchenko, Muhammad Hammad Fahim Siddiqui, Isar Nejadgholi, Kathleen C. Fraser


Abstract
Eradicating poverty is the first goal in the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. However, aporophobia – the societal bias against people living in poverty – constitutes a major obstacle to designing, approving and implementing poverty-mitigation policies. This work presents an initial step towards operationalizing the concept of aporophobia to identify and track harmful beliefs and discriminative actions against poor people on social media. In close collaboration with non-profits and governmental organizations, we conduct data collection and exploration. Then we manually annotate a corpus of English tweets from five world regions for the presence of (1) direct expressions of aporophobia, and (2) statements referring to or criticizing aporophobic views or actions of others, to comprehensively characterize the social media discourse related to bias and discrimination against the poor. Based on the annotated data, we devise a taxonomy of categories of aporophobic attitudes and actions expressed through speech on social media. Finally, we train several classifiers and identify the main challenges for automatic detection of aporophobia in social networks. This work paves the way towards identifying, tracking, and mitigating aporophobic views on social media at scale.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-naacl.388
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6995–7016
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-naacl.388/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Georgina Curto, Svetlana Kiritchenko, Muhammad Hammad Fahim Siddiqui, Isar Nejadgholi, and Kathleen C. Fraser. 2025. Tackling Social Bias against the Poor: a Dataset and a Taxonomy on Aporophobia. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025, pages 6995–7016, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Tackling Social Bias against the Poor: a Dataset and a Taxonomy on Aporophobia (Curto et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-naacl.388.pdf