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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 2:20 am
Time: 2:20 am
Results for political extremism
1 results foundAuthor: Pohjonen, Matti Title: Horizons of Hate: A Comparative Approach to Social Media Hate Speech Summary: My vox-pol fellowship in 2015-2016 coincided with two important developments in Europe. The first was the eruption of social media hate speech that followed hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving from war-ravaged Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The second was the growing buoyancy of the extreme right online, who tried to capitalise on this anger to increase its political power and recruit followers. I had just finished a research project in Ethiopia, a country with a long history of civil war and conflict. It was a sobering experience to return to Europe to discover how the social media debates on the refugee crisis had become more aggressive and vitriolic than anything I had experienced before as a comparative digital media researcher. A cursory look, for instance, at Facebook pages in Finland (a country that is more commonly known for its peaceful politics, consensus, and social stability) would reveal thousands of comments using the most graphic and violent language possible, such as "Those rats should be exterminated from the world," and "Why don’t we shoot the invaders into a hole and burn them with gasoline to warm our feet?" All the hallmarks of ostensibly the worst kind of 'hate speech' were present: attacking people based on their group identity; dehumanising them by comparing them to animals; and incitement to violence. Moreover, such comments were posted by individuals using their public profiles, visible for anybody to see. So if social media conversations in what has been called the safest country in the world had become more violent than those I had observed in a country with an ongoing violent ethnic and political conflict, what was going on in these popular social media forums? Research into the socio-psychological dynamics of violent conflict has shown that an increasingly aggressive and polarised style of communication can be one of the telltale signs of escalating conflict (Hamelink 2011; Buyse 2014). Were these hateful comments possibly a symptom of some underlying social and political tension simmering under the glittering surface of social media screens waiting to erupt into real-world violence? How dangerous were they? As my research progressed, it also became increasingly clear that this growing visibility of social media hate speech was also somehow related to the resurgent confidence of the extreme right online. A new style of online political tactics had emerged, the significance of which researchers and policymakers were struggling to understand: ecosystems of fake news; bots manipulating social media popularity rankings; and disinformation campaigns orchestrated on social media forums (Benkler et al. 2017; Marwick and Lewis 2017; Wardle and Derakhshan 2017). What was the relationship between these activities by the extreme right online and the emergence of social media vitriol that targeted refugees and the people who supported them? How successful were these groups in exploiting the affordances of social media platforms such as Facebook to advance their political goals? A few years later, these questions remain as crucial as ever. Social media debates in Europe and the United States are as toxic as ever. The concerns about the political fallout of extreme right disinformation have become mainstream. Signs of these developments were visible in my research. This report outlines its findings. Details: Dublin: VOX-Pol Network of Excellence, 2018. 62p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed November 2, 2018 at: https://www.voxpol.eu/download/vox-pol_publication/Horizons-of-Hate.pdf Year: 2018 Country: Europe URL: https://www.voxpol.eu/download/vox-pol_publication/Horizons-of-Hate.pdf Shelf Number: 153148 Keywords: Extremism Hate Crimes Hate Speech Internet Crime Political ExtremismSocial Media |