Media Governance and Industries Lab Blog

By Katharina Mayer

‘Silent night, holy night!’ –beautiful words taken from one of the most famous Christmas songs that are part of many families’ Christmas celebrations. However, users of the Internet do not adhere to them even at the most special time at the end of a year. The world of social media is never silent or peaceful. Insulting utterances can be read on various news fora and platforms, where a user or even groups from opposing political camps attack others by posting or commenting on a certain topic every single day. This phenomenon is called ‘hate speech’ and, unfortunately, it has not emerged recently. The development of the Web 2.0 and its various social media platforms favored the outspread of this kind of speech (MacAvaney et al., 2019). Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the division between political and social groups can be observed more obviously looking at the verbal attacks of different societal “in-groups and out-groups” (Caiani et al., 2021, p. 202).

What exactly is ‘hate speech’?

The term ‘hate speech’ cannot be explained with one universal definition since it includes diverse aspects reaching from political hate speech to racial or gender hate speech. With regards to this, the EU Commission’s Code of Conduct defines the term as follows:

Illegal Hate speech is defined in EU law as the public incitement to violence or hatred on the basis of certain characteristics, including race, colour, religion, descent and national or ethnic origin.

(Jourová, 2016)

Investigating the pandemic, more victims are added to the hate speech issue: vaccinated, unvaccinated people but also certain professionals such as the health workers. Furthermore, one person may assess certain phrases or sayings as hate speech while another person may evaluate it as not being hate speech (MacAvaney et al., 2019). This already explains the complexity of defining the subject matter. The social media platform Facebook, which rebranded as ‘Meta’ defines “hate speech as violent or dehumanizing speech, statements of inferiority, calls for exclusion or segregation based on protected characteristics or slurs” (Meta, 2021). Personally, I would broadly define hate speech as verbal attacks against certain groups of people that can have major impacts on individuals as well as on society.

How has hate speech been developing in times of the COVID-19 crisis?

To understand the development of hate speech during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is crucial to dig deeper into the subject matter. Thereby, the reason behind this phenomenon needs to be investigated in greater detail. One cause could be the ‘infodemic’, which evolved with the overflow of information about the COVID-19 crisis that Simon and Camarago also (2021, p. 1) explain as “fast, wide-spreading (false) information about the coronavirus pandemic”. In uncertain times, people feel the urge to receive even more information, thereby conducting it on social media and the Internet, where unfiltered news are spread very easily (Yang & Tian, 2021). However, some users do not check the sources of the information they read and afterwards share with others. To prevent this, media literacy has to be acquired already at early ages so that already children are capable of detecting fake news (Reuter).

As a consequence, so-called ‘filter bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’ are created that according to Kitchens et al. (2020, p. 1619) cause the disruption of “free-flowing information”, where people are confronted with selected information creating the illusion that this is the ‘real truth’. This then leads to interaction characterized by hate speech between different political and social camps. When the worst-case scenario is estimated, there will not only be economic consequences at the end of the pandemic but also social ones, resulting in the segregation of the people living in a country. This could affect the functioning of democracies in the long term.

What measures need to be taken to combat hate speech?

Finding a solution to the debate around hate speech is very challenging since the freedom of speech and freedom of expression is an essential human right. However, it is of major importance to counteract hate speech to avoid tragic consequences since this phenomenon could trigger hate crimes or even result in a genocide (Sponholz, 2017). Therefore, governmental and legal rules and regulations for the interaction on social media platforms and different fora on the Internet are necessary.

Hence, it must be said that the privilege of living in a democracy has to be accompanied by rules to ensure a peaceful cohabitation and the functioning of this form of government. A great help for detecting hate messages can be Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is already employed by different social media networks such as Facebook (Radu, 2020). Additionally, special units that are constructed in the EU are needed to counteract misinformation, thereby maybe preventing the creation of hate speech (Radu, 2020).

Conclusion

To conclude, it can be assumed that COVID-19 functions as fuel for hate speech on social media, since it developed into a highly emotionally charged topic. Battles of words take place not only in the online world, but also in the offline world, where interlocutors are debating about the vaccination, for instance. Unfortunately, when two people with completely opposing views are facing each other, this discussion is mostly not characterized by friendly words. In the heat of the moment, insults and utterances attacking a specific group of people are written or said. Thus, hate speech can be a dangerous component of the public debate because of one of the most important human rights: free speech. Therefore, the challenge to counteract this phenomenon became even more crucial in the crisis we are all living in now. Clear lines need be drawn to ensure a pleasant and peaceful togetherness online, but also in the ‘real’ world. Institutions such as governments, but also the EU at large must notice the great risks and threats of hate speech to the public and the functioning of a democracy.

References

• Caiani, M., Carlotti, B., & Padoan, E. (2021). Online Hate Speech and the Radical Right in Times of Pandemic: The Italian and English Cases. Javnost (Ljubljana, Slovenia), 28(2), 202-218.
• Jourová, V. (2016). Code of Conduct – Illegal online hate speech Questions and answers. https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/code_of_conduct_hate_speech_en.pdf [28.12.2021]
• Kitchens, B., Johnson, S., & Gray, P. (2020). Understanding echo chambers and filter bubbles: The impact of social media on diversification and partisan shifts in news consumption. MIS Quarterly, 44(4), 1619-1650.
• MacAvaney, S., Yao, H., Yang, E., Russell, K., Goharian, N., & Frieder, O. (2019). Hate speech detection: Challenges and solutions. PloS One, 14(8), E0221152.
• Radu, R. (2020). Fighting the ‘Infodemic’: Legal Responses to COVID-19 Disinformation. Social Media Society, 6(3), 205630512094819-2056305120948190.
• Reuter, T. Children’s media literacy in times of fake news. https://univiennamedialab.wordpress.com/2019/08/14/childrens-media-literacy-in- times-of-fake-news/
• Simon, F., & Camargo, C. (2021). Autopsy of a metaphor: The origins, use and blind spots of the ‘infodemic’. New Media & Society, 146144482110319.
• Sponholz, L. (2017). Hate Speech in Den Massenmedien. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH.
• Yang, J., & Tian, Y. (2021). “Others are more vulnerable to fake news than I Am”: Third- person effect of COVID-19 fake news on social media users. Computers in Human Behavior, 125, 106950, p. 1-10.