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On the World Wide Web and on social networks, comments about 'Gypsies' can be highly racist, and the Porrajmos or Gypsy Holocaust, is sometimes openly invoked.
"In order to understand the degree of spread of this creeping anti-Gypsy racism in Italy it is (...) enough to browse the pages of Facebook, currently the most popular social network, a forum where millions of people living in Europe's main countries have now registered freely in order to have conversations in a sort of long-distance discussion forum. Facebook offers users a chance to freely form groups and autonomously propose a topic for debate. Now if you look up “Gypsies” to find what groups are discussing this issue, you will easily come up with a list of about 20 in the Italian language alone, and you will see that participants in most of them—hundreds of people—openly call for a new genocide of the Roma and Sinti people to be carried out post haste. I did a similar search but using the terms “Jews” and got less discouraging results: most groups discuss considerations regarding the memory of the Holocaust and other 20th-century genocides. It was relieving, though it can never be forgotten that this year [2009], just on Holocaust Memorial Day [Jan. 27], we have seen negationist and openly anti-Semitic positions in the news".
(Bravi L., La "questione zingari" nell'Italia fascista. La costruzione culturale di una categoria razziale ['The “Gypsy question” in Fascist Italy. The cultural creation of a racial group'], in Vitale T., "Politiche possibili", Carocci, Roma, 2009, pp. 23-29)
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