Hate Speech in Online Spaces

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Matthew Costello ◽  
James Hawdon
Keyword(s):  
Hate Speech ◽  
Online Spaces

scholarly journals Combatting hate and trolling with love and reason? A qualitative analysis of the discursive antagonisms between organized hate speech and counterspeech online

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 540-572
Author(s):  
Nadine Keller ◽  
Tina Askanius
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Moral Standards ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Media Practices ◽  
Good And Evil

An increasingly organized culture of hate is flourishing in today’s online spaces, posing a serious challenge for democratic societies. Our study seeks to unravel the workings of online hate on popular social media and assess the practices, potentialities, and limitations of organized counterspeech to stymie the spread of hate online. This article is based on a case study of an organized “troll army” of online hate speech in Germany, Reconquista Germanica, and the counterspeech initiative Reconquista Internet. Conducting a qualitative content analysis, we first unpack the strategies and stated intentions behind organized hate speech and counterspeech groups as articulated in their internal strategic documents. We then explore how and to what extent such strategies take shape in online media practices, focusing on the interplay between users spreading hate and users counterspeaking in the comment sections of German news articles on Facebook. The analysis draws on a multi-dimensional framework for studying social media engagement (Uldam & Kaun, 2019) with a focus on practices and discourses and turns to Mouffe’s (2005) concepts of political antagonism and agonism to operationalize and deepen the discursive dimension. The study shows that the interactions between the two opposing camps are highly moralized, reflecting a post-political antagonistic battle between “good” and “evil” and showing limited signs of the potentials of counterspeech to foster productive agonism. The empirical data indicates that despite the promising intentions of rule-guided counterspeech, the counter efforts identified and scrutinized in this study predominantly fail to adhere to civic and moral standards and thus only spur on the destructive dynamics of digital hate culture.

scholarly journals The cult structure of the American anti

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Aburime
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Dangerous Behaviors ◽  
Damaging Effects

The online-based group known as antis, which originated around 2016 in the United States, exhibit morality-based, cult-like behavior and perpetuate hate speech and censorship in online spaces. Anti ideology has encouraged harmful, obsessive, and dangerous behaviors among its members, specifically minors and young adults. An analysis of the antifandom movement through political, sociological, and behavioral lenses reveals its damaging effects on women, people of color, minors, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

scholarly journals From Insult to Hate Speech: Mapping Offensive Language in German User Comments on Immigration

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-180
Author(s):  
Sünje Paasch-Colberg ◽  
Christian Strippel ◽  
Joachim Trebbe ◽  
Martin Emmer
Keyword(s):  
Hate Speech ◽  
Subject Area ◽  
Text Annotation ◽  
User Comments ◽  
Speech Mapping ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Facebook Pages ◽  
Offensive Language

In recent debates on offensive language in participatory online spaces, the term ‘hate speech’ has become especially prominent. Originating from a legal context, the term usually refers to violent threats or expressions of prejudice against particular groups on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation. However, due to its explicit reference to the emotion of hate, it is also used more colloquially as a general label for any kind of negative expression. This ambiguity leads to misunderstandings in discussions about hate speech and challenges its identification. To meet this challenge, this article provides a modularized framework to differentiate various forms of hate speech and offensive language. On the basis of this framework, we present a text annotation study of 5,031 user comments on the topic of immigration and refuge posted in March 2019 on three German news sites, four Facebook pages, 13 YouTube channels, and one right-wing blog. An in-depth analysis of these comments identifies various types of hate speech and offensive language targeting immigrants and refugees. By exploring typical combinations of labeled attributes, we empirically map the variety of offensive language in the subject area ranging from insults to calls for hate crimes, going beyond the common ‘hate/no-hate’ dichotomy found in similar studies. The results are discussed with a focus on the grey area between hate speech and offensive language.

scholarly journals The Gab Hate Corpus: A collection of 27k posts annotated for hate speech

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan Kennedy ◽  
Mohammad Atari ◽  
Aida Mostafazadeh Davani ◽  
Leigh Yeh ◽  
Ali Omrani ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Classification Performance ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Social Network Service ◽  
The Social ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Just Society

The growing prominence of online hate speech is a threat to a safe and just society. This endangering phenomenon requires collaboration across the sciences in order to generate evidence-based knowledge of, and policies for, the dissemination of hatred in online spaces. To foster such collaborations, here we present the Gab Hate Corpus (GHC), consisting of 27,665 posts from the social network service gab.ai, each annotated by a minimum of three trained annotators. Annotators were trained to label posts according to a coding typology derived from a synthesis of hate speech definitions across legal, computational, psychological, and sociological research. We detail the development of the corpus, describe the resulting distributions of hate-based rhetoric, target group, and rhetorical framing labels, and establish baseline classification performance for each using standard natural language processing methods. The GHC, which is the largest theoretically-justified, annotated corpus of hate speech to date, provides opportunities for training and evaluating hate speech classifiers and for scientific inquiries into the linguistic and network components of hate speech.

scholarly journals A Forensic Interpretation of Hateful Micro-Speech Acts and Performative Modality in Facebook and Twitter during 2017 Election-Kenya

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 74-85
Author(s):  
Fredrick Meeme Irimba ◽  
Jacinta Ndambuki ◽  
Florence Mwithi
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Physical Violence ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
National Police

The increasing shift of human activities to online spaces in Kenya has resulted in the new behaviours among internet consumers. One such behaviour is the growing online public journalism phenomenon amid legal and regulatory gaps permeating expression of online hate speech rhetoric disguised as ‘politically correct talk’ which often goes unquestioned despite its injurious force and the potential to precipitate physical violence in the long run. To judge content as hateful, Kenya’s judicial processes rely the establishment of speech intention to hurt a legally protected entity. However, hate speech law enforcers lack skill and capacity to accurately determine the pragmatic force of hateful language. This article, which is a part of broad study that examined the discursive construction of online hate rhetoric, examines the injurious potential of online micro-speech acts and performative modality of selected Facebook posts and tweets constituting the day-to-day communicative practices online during the 2017 general election in Kenya. Working within forensic-based Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) framework, we analyse a purposive sample of 160 posts; FB (120) and Twitter (40) collected through online observation of Facebook groups and hashtags trending in Kenya between July and November 2017. The findings show how micro-speech acts and performative modality worked in service of aggressive ideology in the form of overt and covert appeals for collective prejudice against marked ethno-political out-groups. These insights are relevant for policy makers such as NCIC, KHR and CAK as well as the hate speech law enforcers especially National Police Service and prosecutors in understanding how certain commonsensical day to day online communicative practices yield pragmatic potential to propagate ideologically rooted culture of hate and violence in multi-ethnic cultural contexts such as Kenya.

The Roma in Post-Communist Bulgaria: Growing Social Marginalization and State Policies

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Yorgos Christidis
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Hate Crime ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
State Policies ◽  
Social Marginalization ◽  
Popular Support ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
The Poor

This article analyzes the growing impoverishment and marginalization of the Roma in Bulgarian society and the evolution of Bulgaria’s post-1989 policies towards the Roma. It examines the results of the policies so far and the reasons behind the “poor performance” of the policies implemented. It is believed that Post-communist Bulgaria has successfully re-integrated the ethnic Turkish minority given both the assimilation campaign carried out against it in the 1980s and the tragic events that took place in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This Bulgaria’s successful “ethnic model”, however, has failed to include the Roma. The “Roma issue” has emerged as one of the most serious and intractable ones facing Bulgaria since 1990. A growing part of its population has been living in circumstances of poverty and marginalization that seem only to deteriorate as years go by. State policies that have been introduced since 1999 have failed at large to produce tangible results and to reverse the socio-economic marginalization of the Roma: discrimination, poverty, and social exclusion continue to be the norm. NGOs point out to the fact that many of the measures that have been announced have not been properly implemented, and that legislation existing to tackle discrimination, hate crime, and hate speech is not implemented. Bulgaria’s political parties are averse in dealing with the Roma issue. Policies addressing the socio-economic problems of the Roma, including hate speech and crime, do not enjoy popular support and are seen as politically damaging.

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