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According to Ong (1986), for a long time, in the human history, direct or "vis-à-vis" communication has been the only modality of communication; traditions have essentially been oral and their survival depended on the continuous renewal, which was represented by the "vis-à-vis" narration of stories and activities. In this way, the oral culture has created some expedients to remind and let people remind some aspects: a certain structure of the speech (fixed themes, formulas, proverbs, rhythmic style, etc.), a particular kind of (narrative) speech, a specific behavioral schematization ("strong" characters, types). The communication process is always a fundamental and essential process (Wright, 1976): it involves individuals in a deep relationship inside which the linguistic and paralinguistic codes, which come into play, take on complex meanings. In fact, despite the apparent facility through which two or more people come into contact among them, the deep sense of communication is something which is complicated and mysterious. Each person, who is involved in the communication process, attributes, on the basis of his/her subjective and social-group existential experience, his/her own meaning to each sign. According to Wolton (2006), communication has to do with four dimensions, which are complementary among them: first of all, communication is the ideal of expression and exchange which is at the origin of the Western culture and of democracy; talking about democracy presumes, as a basic concept, the existence of free and equal individuals. Communication concerns also those media which have remarkably transformed the relationships between communication and society. Still, communication concerns the whole mechanism of the new technologies that, with information science, telecommunications, audiovisuals and their interconnection, have globally modified the premises of the exchange of messages and power. In the end, communication includes also all those values, those symbols and those representations which function as a mechanism for the functioning of the public space, of democracies and of the international community through information and media.

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Hate speech is evidence that social networks do not always favor modern democracies; there are more and more issues related to their misuse, putting Western values at stake. This phenomenon has increased with the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this paper is to investigate in Spanish and Italian university students their perceptions of hate speech such as sexting, grooming, cyberbullying, to analyze their online behaviors as victims and aggressors and to explore the forms of hatred towards people who have played a relevant role in the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a quantitative-descriptive methodology, 418 university students from both countries participated, recruited through non-probabilistic sampling. The results obtained show that in both countries there is an increase in the perception of hatred during COVID-19. In this context, the most increased forms of violence are sexting, gender violence and cyberbullying; among the most affected categories are healthcare workers, supermarket workers, and people with disabilities. Therefore, the results highlight the need to address hate speech with an educational approach oriented towards both critical and responsible media literacy as well as respect for diversity, interculturality, and emotional education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]