Introduction
With the development of technologies, Internet and online platform nowadays play important roles in social communities. By using Internet and have interact on the online platform, people could feel free to express their perspective and gain other information. To define the concept of free speech, Alexander (2018) states in the book that Freedom of Speech is widely held to be a moral right and almost as widely recognized as a legal right. It was defended by John Milton in the 17th century and enshrined in the Constitution of the United States in 1791 as part of the First Amendment. On the other words, every citizen has right to speech freely. To apply this concept to the online platform, the online platform users could speak out their own thoughts on the online platform by obeying the basic law. The free speech on the online platform is not only means the text content, but also includes the plays, pictures, movies, and so forth. However, since the freedom of online speech, it brings numerous problems. The most obviously problem is the appearance of hate speech. Hate speech is speech or expression that denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership in a social group identified by attributes such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, physical or mental disability, and others (Curtis, 2016). To be more specifically, both directly and indirectly attacked speech are harmful since some indirectly hate speech will lead a direction of public opinion to attack a person or a group. Actually, the conflict between free speech and hate speech always exist. Because of the freedom of express, it is undeniable that a part of people takes advantage of free speech to create the hate speech.
In this blog, two examples of online hate speech will be mentioned, which are discrimination and gender hate speech. These hate speeches are the most popular topics in this digital media age. We must deny that inequality has always existed. Additionally, I will discuss the reason to make these types of hate speeches and the solution of these hate speeches in this blog.
Anti-feminist hate speech
There is an example about the anti-feminist hate speech on the online platform. Anshan, a 20-year-old Korean female athlete, beat Russia’s Elena Osipova 6-5 to win the in the women individual archery event gold medal in Tokyo Olympics. It was her third gold medal of the Games, following South Korea’s victories in the women’s team and mixed team events over the weekend. However, her unusual short haircut pushed her to the peak of Korean public opinion. Males on the online social media platform gave plenty of negative comment even some prejudiced views to An. A numerous male Korean attacked her haircut on their online social media. A post called Women who attend women’s universities and have a short cut are 90 percent likely to be feminist became a hot topic in Korea at that time. In this post, the author states that the reason he did not support Anshan is her short haircut and feminists. The anti-feminist author said women with short haircut are not the real women and he cannot accept feminist. In fact, it is not the first time An had been attacked because of her short haircut. Before Tokyo Olympics, An posted a video about her archery exercise on Instagram. But many comments did not focus on her exercise, only care about her short haircut. Additionally, after An won the gold medal, dozens of South Korean men posted hundreds of complaints on the Korea Archery Association’s online bulletin board that the group have to revoke An’s two Olympic gold medals because of her feminist look and haircut. As one man complained, “She had short hair, went to the only college for women — she reeked of feminism” (Choi, 2021). Although An won these two gold medals, Korean male who are anti-feminist cannot ignore her short haircut and used the attacklike words to assault her as a feminist. According to the New York Times, San’s hairstyle has stoked “anti-feminist” bullying on social media. Culturally, the feminist label is still shrouded in negativity in South Korea and some associate it with hating men (Nasinde, 2021). The anti-feminist believe that the feminist is absolutely be the opposite side of patriarchy, which is a phenomenon of hatting and opposing male. This is the main reason that they cannot tolerate the existence of feminist.
Actually, the gender discrimination is always existing, especially in Korea. The status of women in society cannot be correctly treated. The hate speech of female and feminist in Korean online social media is overwhelming. According to a data analysis, the South has the highest gender wage gap in the OECD club of developed countries, while women do 2.6 times as much unpaid domestic work as men. Only 5.2 percent of Korean conglomerates’ board members are female (France 24, 2021). The status of female in Korea cannot be fairly treated as males. Thanks to the long time oppressing to female, the feminism is dazzling presence in Korea, which is the representative of reactionary viewpoint. To revolt the hate speech of anti-feminist on the online platform, some women users created a hashtag #women_shortcut_campaign on Twitter to support An. They upload their short haircut photographs in this hashtag to against the anti-feminist males. Besides, people have been requesting the Korea Archery Association to protect An from hate comments and take a strong stance against those posting them. Over 300 requests have been posted on the association’s website as of Thursday morning (Yang, 2021). Additionally, female in other countries also have the negative experience because of the online gender hate speeches. In other countries, 73.4% women who blog about politics or identify as feminist have suffered negative experiences online (Castaño-Pulgarín, Suárez-Betancur, Vega, & López, 2021). To totally change the perspective of the feminism is still a challenging work, especially in Korea. Both government and platform should prefect their rules to protect female to avoid the anti-feminist hat speech on the online social media platforms.
Racial discrimination
Racial discrimination is always an international topic. With the rapidly growing cases of COVID-19 pandemic all over the world, Asian people became the target of online hate and harassment group. The online social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, were the most serious areas to attack Asian people. The persuasive example could be used is Twitter. Twitter users created numerous hashtags to make the racial discrimination to Asian. The hashtags #WuhanVirus, #kung-Flu, and #ChinaVirus demonstrated an increasing trend on Twitter at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak period. Data gathered between November 1, 2019, to March 22, 2020, from two prominent online web platforms revealed significant increases in racial slurs such as “#WuhanVirus,” “#Kung-Flu,” “#Chinakidsstayhome,” and “#ChingChong.” The term “Chink” was the most popular slur, increasing from about 1250 Twitter mentions to more than 3500 mentions during March 2020 alone (Tahmasbi et al., 2020). Online platform users intentionally or otherwise be influenced by these hashtags, they use vicious words to attack Asian includes their appearance and behaviors. Even some crazy users sponsor the hate campaign to Asian. COVID-19-related anti-Asian discrimination that encompasses directly witnessing, viewing online, or the relaying of personal narratives, may have negative impacts on the mental health of both A/AA and non-Asian people (Hahm et al., 2021). These hate speech behavior on the online platforms brought Asian the irreversible influences in their daily life and deeply hurt them. Because of these hate speeches even death threats posts or comments on the online platform, plenty of Asian who live in the United States feel unsafety and afraid of walking outside to go shopping or work. According to the survey from anti-hate group ADL, 21% of Asian-American respondents said they were harassed online (Guynn & Bajak, 2021). The main reason that these hate speeches spread on the online platforms rapidly is the online misleading information. With so many people searching for reliable and accurate information online, the issue of misinformation, conspiracy theories and fake news, some of which is fuelling anti-Asian narratives, is also a major priority for social media companies (Madison Web Solutions, n.d.). It is undeniable that the misleading information is related to the online hate speech since the public opinion usually be led by the known information without any proving.
To avoid the online hate speech to the racial discrimination, the most important aim is to eliminate the misleading information at full steam. Platforms’ protection of humor in their policies contributed to the circulation of overt racist memes, videos and racist comments. Other affordances like the Twitter’s sensitive media filter were used to disguise hate speech and liking and sharing practices contributed to amplify overt and covert speech across platforms (Matamoros-Fernández, 2017). From the online social media platforms perspective, pay more attention to seek and identify the reliable information source and delete the hate speech to block the spread of false information could help to decrease the online hate speech. In addition, check the comments and posts which is aggressive and conductive and ban them to prevent the attack spread.
Conclusion
Online hate speech depends on the free speech that everyone has right to express their points of view or thoughts. Online debates are often characterized by extreme polarization and heated discussions among users. The presence of hate speech online is becoming increasingly problematic, making necessary the development of appropriate countermeasures (Cinelli et al., 2021). With the development of social media platform, more and more varied perspectives could be voiced online. However, because of the difficulty to define the hate speech accurately, to protect every user’s benefit and maintain a clear Internet surround, the policy target to the online hate speech is essential. Besides the above types of discrimination hate speeches, there are also numerous hate speeches from individual to country, which is a hidden danger to harm the healthy online platform. To control the online hate speech is an important work from now to future. In the European Union (EU), 80% of people have encountered hate speech online and 40% have felt attacked or threatened via Social Network Sites [SNS] (Gagliardone, Gal, Alves, & Martinez, 2015). Because of the stronger consciousness of online platform users, this serious problem is recognized by an increasing trend among them. For the online platform themselves, to find out the sensitive posts and comments which may related to the discrimination or hate speech and banned them timely could prevent the spread of hate speech to a great extent. Since to recognize the hate speech comments and posts are difficult, platforms should pay more attention on evaluating and governance intensively. Additionally, to check authenticity of the information is also an important way to avoid the online hate speech. By confirming the correct and accurate information before posting on the platform, the conflict could be decreased so that the online hate speech will also have a decreasing trend.
Reference
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