Keywords: Online Hate Speech, Racism, Discrimination, Anti-Asian Sentiment, Polarization, #StopAsianHate, COVID-19, Hate Crimes, 2021 Atlanta spa shootings
Introduction: What is Online Hate Speech?
From the documents that eSafety Commissioner (eSafety, Australia’s independent regulator for online safety) published, more than half of young internet users in Australia have at least witnessed online hate speech (eSafety Commissioner, n.d.). Online hate is a complicated term that can be defined as a kind of discrimination that happens online. Any hate post based on the race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability or gender of an individual or group could be seen as online hate speech (eSafety Commissioner, n.d.). As social media and digital platforms continue to expand, so does online harm, with children and young adults in particular being one of the groups most at risk due to their addiction to the internet and overuse of social networking sites. For instance, the impacts of online hate speech not only reflected in physical harm to the victim and also factor in a wider societal cost, such as normalisation of discrimination, radicalization against others (“The consequences of online hate speech – a teenager’s perspective | SELMA Hacking Hate”, 2019). More specifically, victims of online hate speech may present low self-esteem, sleep disturbances, increased anxiety, and feelings of fear and insecurity (“The consequences of online hate speech – a teenager’s perspective | SELMA Hacking Hate”, 2019) that hinder their use of social media and create social anxiety. Therefore, regulation of hate speech on social media will therefore be a thorny contemporary challenge of whether the infrastructure of social media platforms and the content of its online environment and their offline effects are being regulate ethically.
This blog post will explore a series of cases, including anti-Asian sentiment, that have resulted from the growth of explosive hate speech against racism during the COVID-19 pandemic. I will also discuss the connection between online hate speech and the report of hate crime through the case, the common forms of hate speech, and the solutions that governments conduct to regulate hate speech online.
Online Hate Speech under COVID-19
“Instances and discussions around online hate speech have increased by 38% since the pandemic began in March 2020” (Ditch The Label, 2021), according to a collaborative analysis data report by Brandwatch and Ditch the Label. COVID-19 cannot be seen solely as a public health problem, but as a crisis involving profound social and psychological problems (Uyheng & Carley, 2021). As social media democratizes public discourse, speech in online spaces has become more and more free, but it also means that the venting of negative emotions can lead to serious social divisions. For instance, discussions about racism and racial inequality surge with the announcement of COVID-19 pandemic by the WHO in March 2022 (World Health Organization, 2022), a great number of posts targeting Asians, Asian Americans or British Asians flooded the social media platforms of Twitter and Facebook. Due to the link between virus and its primary infection in China as well as the social disruption caused by the role of certain political leaders in promoting their political tactics (Uyheng & Carley, 2021), some people even referred to the virus as the “Chinese virus” or “Kung flu”(Ditch The Label, 2021). This shows a kind of ‘Infodemic’ that contains excessive false or misleading information amplifies harmful information (World Health Organization, n.d.) in a negative way due to the expansion of social media and internet use.
While there is no direct evidence that online hate speech leads to offline violence (Williams, 2019), the impact of growing online polarization on tensions between communities is clear. A large percentage of people feel anger, hatred, sadness or shame when they see online hate, while a significant number of others feel fear or dread when they see online hate (Reichelmann et al., 2021). Terrorist attacks and anti-Muslim hate speech on social media fueled by anti-Muslim hype in Western media due to the outbreak of refugee flows in Europe including Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi refugees (Olteanu et al., 2018). The conflation of refugees and Muslims with Islamic fanatics has led to a surge in hate crimes against Muslim communities. Public opinion surveys in Europe shows that there are around 25 million Muslims living in EU countries and that only a very small minority of Muslims engage in radical activities, while their presence is seen as a threat to national identity, domestic security and the social fabric (Khader, n.d.). Most Muslims believe that Europeans are controversial, contentious, fearful, and even hateful towards them. However, Europeans overestimate the proportion of Muslims in the total population; for example, Muslims make up only 6% of the total population, but the French estimate them at over 31% (Khader, n.d.). It is this concern that Europe is being invaded by this imagined huge population growth, and that they will not be assimilated, that creates tensions between communities.
Case : #StopAsianHate
The Stop Asian Hate movement is a good example of response to against the online toxicity of violence targeting Asians and Asian Americans. The origin of the Stop Asian Movement was through a platform for Asians to speak about their experiences of discrimination was launched by Manjusha Kulkarni, Cynthia Choi and Russell Jeung in 2020 after Kulkarni’s story about an Asian American high school student who was severely beaten by a classmate in Los Angeles (Gover et al., 2020). Anti-Asian hate speech increased by 2,770% in 2020 compared to 2019 (Ditch The Label, 2021), and there are about 2,800 reports of hate crimes in 2020 by the Stop AAPI Hate group statistics are related to anti-Asian discrimination and violence (“Covid ‘hate crimes’ against Asian Americans on rise”, 2021). Increasing reports of violence, threats, and attacks against Asian has brought people’s aware to a positive correlation of online hate speech and the offline harm. People start to focus on the #StopAsianHate hashtag has
From a research Article about hate speech, Hate Knows No Boundaries: Online Hate in Six Nations, Facebook is considered to be the most possible place to see hateful material which voted by 55% of Polish respondents and 40% of American and French respondents (Reichelmann et al., 2021). From the Stop AAPI Hate National Report, we know that most places of discrimination against Asians take place on public streets, at 32.4% of the total, and 10.1% online, ranking fourth overall (Horse et al., 2021). Online racial hate crimes account for 52% of all online hate crimes (Reichelmann et al., 2021). Moreover, the discourse effect of journalists’ coverage of racial violence in major media outlets can also lead to a surge in online hatred and fuel xenophobia and polarization. From the report of Atlanta spa shootings in 2021, it was believed to be the result of severe racial discrimination – claiming the lives of eight people, including six Asian women (Zhou, 2022). However, it wasn’t until it was seen by more Asians and commented on social media, sparking the #StopAsianHate wave, that both the police and the media seemed to accept that the shooting carried out by the white man was not racially motivated. The emphasis on the victims being both white and Asian brought up discussions of racial bias, as it negated the fact that the attackers targeted Asian-owned businesses (Zhou, 2022). The shooting became a breakthrough in the condemnation of anti-Asian violence, including violent attacks on elderly Asian Americans (Brantley-Jones & Chen, 2021), vandalism of businesses and attacks on the streets (Yeung, 2022), which all came together to create a wave of discussion on the internet, sparking hundreds of thousands of petitions and crowdfunding campaigns, rallies in over 50 cities (Zhou, 2022). Journalists’ use of language, content selection, and positioning in their news stories fuels xenophobia against Asian Americans, and language patterns that support white racial framing ultimately led to the continuation of white supremacy in the debate over whether racial motivations influence shootings (Ichinose, 2021). While the use of hashtags like #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate on Twitter and Instagram also served to support victims and condemn anti-Asian violence and changed the awareness of anti-Asian racism (Zhou, 2022).
Impact of Online Hate
Online hate could generate radicalization. Radicalization is seen as a process whereby people adopt increasingly radical views to oppose politics, society, or religion (Wright & Hankins, 2016). The nature of online media allows for this growth in radicalization as its ability to cross borders, bridge distances and break down real-world barriers allows hate groups and movements to target large audiences, and the anonymity, immediacy and global nature of the Internet making it easy for viewers to be exposed to large amounts of extremist content (Banks, 2010).
How do countries regulate hate speech online?
As a result of the difficulty in regulating internet, the increase in online hate speech is complemented by the difficulty of regulating such activity. With 53% of Asian Americans citing education and 30% citing increased enforcement as an effective solution to anti-AAPI sentiment (Horse et al., 2021). The judiciary is unlikely to proactively invest significant time and money in investigating these online hate incidents because they need to address crimes of significant public priority, and therefore the police will only respond to online hate speech when they come forward to report a specific crime as a victim of online hate speech, or when they have experienced offline harm (Banks, 2010). Although there is no globalized common regulatory mechanism for online hate speech, an increasing number of countries are now attempting to combat the spread of hate propaganda online.
Australia’s approach
In Australia, the eSafety Commissioner has developed a ‘Safety by Design’ framework to facilitate a reduction of risk in the design of products by technology companies (eSafetly Commissioner, n.d.). The Federal Parliament has also enacted an ‘Online Safety Act’ to protect children from cyberbullying and from incitement to extreme violence live (Gelber, 2021). Other related law including the Racial Discrimination Act revised by the Federal Labour Government which covers the infringement of “offensive, insulting, humiliating or intimidating another person because of their race, colour or national or ethnic origin” but do not include religion, sexual orientation, and gender (Koslowski & Lewis, 2020). Violations of this civil law may be subject to complaints by the Australian Human Rights Commission and will be subject to agreements between the defamed and rarely confronted in court (Koslowski & Lewis, 2020).
Germany’s approach
The Network Enforcement Act, also known as the Facebook Act, is a German law to combat online hate speech and fake news in social media (“Germany starts enforcing hate speech law”, 2018). The law allows social media sites to act on law-breaking material to remove hate speech, fake news and illegal material within 24 hours, otherwise they will face fines of up to 50m euro (“Germany starts enforcing hate speech law”, 2018). The enforcement of the law targeted social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and enable 24/7 free speech surveillance on social networks and media sites with millions of German social media users.
Conclusion
The Internet as a means of communication has grown so rapidly in the 21st century that cyberspace has become the place where people spend most of their time. Hate speech fueled by discrimination that based on deep rooted social issues in existing societies never cease. Due to the equal availability of the internet to all, it facilitates the harassment and expression of hatred by hate groups and makes it more likely that those who spread hate to harm others without recourse to the law in the “safe haven” of the internet. However, our current criminal laws governing the Internet, both unilaterally and multilaterally, are far from adequate to reduce the impact of online hatred. The global nature and anonymity of the Internet has created unprecedented challenges for judicial institutions in different countries to strike a balance between accurately identifying and restricting online hate speech and empowering the public to free speech. Improving education and guidance by integrating the law may be a good approach to governance. But more practically speaking, the purpose through these mechanisms is not to “eliminate” and monitor people’s right to free speech. Instead, our goal should be to stop or minimize racism and protect vulnerable groups both online and offline.
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