Abstract. Harmful information in social media, both disinformation and hate speech, is pervasive. Emotional content can be exploited by malicious agents to provoke inflammatory responses and exacerbate polarisation in online debate. Disinformation often is conveyed through text with a high emotional valence. Emotions have in fact a key role: fake news tend to trigger different emotions and of different intensity to the users compared to texts containing truthful information. Readers prefer high arousal news, which catches more attention than regular news and sticks easily on mind. Moreover, the emotional bias may distort the perception of argumentation, for instance bringing one person to refute to acknowledge facts that upset them. In this talk I will mainly focus on disinformation and how this problem is perceived and addressed at EU level, being disinformation campaigns (often from abroad) considered as a form of information warfare and an attempt to trigger negative emotions and create polarization in our democracies. I will also show what kind of emotional responses may trigger narratives where conspiracy theories are mentioned. The language of these narratives is inherently different, and it works on a subconscious, emotional layer, exploiting the readers’ biases that may distort the perception of argumentation, for instance bringing one person to refute to acknowledge facts that upset them. In the last part of the talk, I will address the problem of sexism identification in memes, showing what kind of emotions are triggered and how emotional signals can be extracted with physiological data collected via eye-tracking, heart rate, and EEG signals.