Living hated: Everyday experiences of hate speech across online and offline contexts

1 Introduction

The escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, the migration and climate crises, the illiberal turn of some EU member states and the COVID-19 pandemic—all these crises combined have sparked social tensions and caused hate speech (HS) to proliferate around Europe. Although HS has permeated all critical areas of life (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2023), online spaces seem to be particularly problematic as social networking sites are prone to HS proliferation due to affordances such as anonymity, low threshold access, speed and audience engagement size (Brown, 2018; Leonhard et al., 2018). Bilewicz and Soral (2020) have even coined the term “hate speech epidemic” as the proliferation of HS itself erodes the ability to intervene against HS, normalizes it in people’s lives and leads to its omnipresence.

That omnipresence in both the online as well as offline spheres is the focus of this article. We explore what it means for HS targets to live daily under such conditions, how we can understand HS in this omnipresent context, how it affects the everyday lives of those targeted by HS and the support they can get. Based on semi-structured interviews with respondents from diverse backgrounds, our study complements recent quantitative surveys focused mostly on online hate speech.

In the theoretical overview, we summarize current research on HS, mainly focusing on HS theorized as an act of hate speech and its connection to regulation, legal support and online civic support. We then clarify our position in this context and discuss the victim’s perspective. We argue for expanding HS theories with the concept of everydayness to capture HS in its epidemical omnipresence across offline and online contexts. Furthermore, we consider omnipresent HS to have both spatial and temporal dimensions of durability, repetitiveness, cumulation and longevity. In the empirical analysis, we provide evidence that everyday HS is (1) experienced as a flow, (2) taking place within a particular dynamic of cumulative desensitization, (3) shifting the relations of HS victims to offline/online spaces and (4) connected with ambivalence and problems getting everyday support. We conclude by discussing the results, suggesting possible applications and outlining avenues for future research.

2 Theoretical overview

Scholarly debates about hate speech and its harms have been heavily influenced by their disciplinary and political contexts. Building on Austin’s (1962) speech act framework, legal scholars and critical race and feminist theorists conceptualized HS as an act (Delgado, 1982; Matsuda, 1989; Calvert, 1997). Austin’s performative theory allows us to relate HS to its harms as it understands a hate speech act as a form of conduct possibly constituting harm in an utterance itself (illocutionary act) as well as causing harm through the utterance’s effects (perlocutionary act) (Neu, 2008). This framing is essential as it helped reveal HS as a tangible act that reinforces subordination and cements structural inequalities, the racial and sexual domination of minorities and the intersectional functioning of power relations in society (Matsuda et al., 1993; Calvert, 1997; Nielsen, 2004; Crenshaw, 2017). Understanding HS as a concrete, harmful act also allows for HS regulation within the framework of criminal sanctions against discrimination. This act-oriented ramification remains prevalent today. Obermaier et al. (2023), for instance, define HS as a statement intended to denigrate or harm a group of people based on aspects of their ascribed identity.

Adopting the hate speech act perspective enables us to relate HS to structural inequalities and distinguish between the immediate and long-term impacts of HS acts on their targets (Gelber and McNamara, 2016). Many psychological, physical and social effects have been well documented, such as anxiety; self-harm; personal insecurity; lower self-esteem; fear; the internalization of inferiority (Delgado, 1982; Matsuda, 1989; Whitten, 2020; Obermaier et al., 2023); higher suicide rates (Mullen and Smyth, 2004); quitting jobs; distancing from schools; changing the way people dress, talk and interact (Nielsen, 2004); loneliness; and social exclusion (Leets, 2002) as well as health issues such as chronic stress (Crowley, 2014), depression (Tynes et al., 2008) or high blood pressure (Matsuda et al., 1993).

Although the conceptual framework of HS as an act remains essential today, over the years, it has received specifications, corrections and criticism (Neu, 2008, pp. 167–168; Gelber and McNamara, 2016; Whitten, 2020). The coupling between documenting and understanding HS harms was also problematized to move and push forward legal cases. Critical legal scholars expected targets to report HS incidents to the police and courts, framed as the universally desired institutional support (Matsuda et al., 1993). However, this expectation proved to be partly wrong. Many studies have shown that victims do not report HS due to distrust, the normalization of hate, fear of secondary victimization and negative experiences with repressive and legal state apparatus (Carr, 2016; Gelber and McNamara, 2016). Besides, many HS targets do not consider it a legal problem but rather social and personal (Nielsen, 2004). These were crucial findings that were invisible to legal scholars as they mainly worked with court cases as examples in their studies.

Furthermore, hate speech takes place daily. As a result, most HS cases remain unreported and unprosecuted simply due to their regularity and omnipresence (Gelber and McNamara, 2016; European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2023). Striving to transform the everyday occurrence of HS acts into separate legal acts would not only be practically impossible for the victims (Carr, 2016) but, as Butler points out, could also lead to reinforcing the oppressive mechanisms of the state (Butler, 1997). At the same time, research focused on different correlations between HS harms and support systems, including family, community and friend-based social support systems, have returned inconclusive results so far (Noh and Kaspar, 2003; Ajrouch et al. 2010; Ortiz, 2019; Giwa, 2022).

Nevertheless, with the emergence of online HS in the last 15 years, the connection between HS harms and support systems has gained new urgency. Departing from research focused on victims (and their perspectives), many quantitative and experimental studies emerged scrutinizing the limits, determinants, repertoires of action, consequences, dynamics and group differences of online interventions by social media users against HS (Kunst et al., 2021; Obermaier, 2022; Rudnicki and Vandebosch, 2023; Obermaier et al., 2023; Hansen et al., 2023). In this regard, desensitization processes are particularly intriguing, apart from the well-documented bystander effect (Leonhard et al., 2018). Through frequent exposure to hate and violence in the media, online games and social media, people’s sensitivity to HS tends to decrease. Thus, when witnessing HS, they not only notice it less, become less inclined to intervene on behalf of targets or accept HS as usual but even internalize and express it themselves (Leets, 2001; Soral et al., 2018; Ortiz, 2019; Soral et al., 2022).

3 Our position

As hate speech in contemporary Europe spreads epidemically and occurs well beyond what is reported (Bilewicz and Soral, 2020; European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2023), our default position is not to treat HS primarily as a legal act or an online phenomenon but as a daily occurrence. Thus, to properly understand the variety of HS harms and the effectiveness of support systems, we focus on their everydayness. Characteristics such as regularity, routine, invisibility, elusiveness and recurrence are crucial for understanding HS’s complexity and for distinguishing it from hate crime. Hate crime has a structure closer to a traumatic event and its post-traumatic aftermath (Salter and McGuire, 2020). Although several psychological and medicinal studies did analyse HS as a traumatic event (Leets, 2002; Crowley, 2014), we see HS as closer to microaggressions, with repetitive, mostly more minor, but cumulative injuries, which can and do lead to significant issues (Sue, 2010). If we can see microaggression as an implicitly offensive variant of abusive language, then, like Ashida and Komachi (2022, p. 11), we include it in the same set as hate speech. The significant similarity between the two then lies in the long-term effect and the concurrent shared feeling of bystanders that “nothing happened”, that is, the low intensity of the individual impact of microaggression, which, nevertheless, accumulates with each repetition (Ong and Burrow, 2017, p. 173). Different terms have been proposed to capture this HS harm characteristic—“accumulated discriminatory experiences” (Feagin, 1991), “discrimination as process” (Feagin and Sikes, 1995), “cumulative harm” (Calvert, 1997) and “enduring, not ephemeral harms” (Gelber and McNamara, 2016). Our research aims to expand on these concepts.

With the focus on the daily experience of HS, we want to reinvigorate an interest in the victim’s perspective (Feagin and Sikes, 1995; Gelber and McNamara, 2016), which was partly set aside in recent years due to the focus on researching bystanders (Rudnicki and Vandebosch, 2023). Just as it was important for critical legal scholars to give voice to victims to make a case for HS as a legal act (Matsuda et al., 1993), we believe it is as essential to give space to victim stories to make a case for HS as a cumulative life situation. To conceptualize HS as a daily lived experience, we consider existing theories insufficient as they presuppose that hate speech is an HS act. Instead, stemming from our expertise, we use concepts from social anthropology that focus on everydayness and violence.

Stewart understands the everyday as “a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergencies” to which people tend to become attuned—what she calls “ordinary affects” (Stewart, 2007, p. 2). To understand how such affects in daily life are impacted by HS, a concept of violence is needed. From the 1990s onwards, anthropologists have analysed everyday life as it concerns violence, pain and suffering (Scheper-Hughes, 1993; Kleinman et al., 1997; Berlant, 2007). The term “violence of everyday life” is used to document how “the violence of global processes […] translates into the severe deprivations of everyday life” (Das, 1997, p. 204). This concept of everyday violence connects the structural violence of discrimination, articulated in the HS context by critical race and feminist theorists such as Matsuda (1989) or Crenshaw (2017), with an elaborated understanding of everydayness. Everyday violence can reconstitute one’s relation to self and others, recalibrate the field of ordinary affects, erode lives and bring “the kind of destruction that consists of small, recurring, repetitive crises … happening repeatedly, undramatically, uneventfully” (Das, 2020, pp. 6–7). Everyday violence thus moves beyond specific acts and events into motions taking place “uneventfully” and thus enables us to grasp HS as a repetitive life constellation for people affected daily.

Drawing on the concept of everyday violence, our study aims to move beyond the online/offline binary and complement research on harms and supports in solely offline (e. g., Gelber and McNamara, 2016; Giwa, 2022) or online (e. g., Kunst et al., 2021; Obermaier, 2022; Hansen et al., 2023) settings. We pick up Brown’s call to design research on HS harms across online-offline interfaces because “the content of hate speech across online and offline platforms is similar and mutually reinforcing” (2018, p. 6). To empirically investigate it, we specifically focus on the spatial dimension of HS (Feagin, 1991; Nielsen, 2004).

In doing so, we mainly draw from recent debates in anthropology, where the relationship between online and offline practices and experiences is conceptualized as dialectical (Miller and Horst, 2012). From this perspective, all interpersonal interactions, whether online or offline, are mediated differently. The online and offline spaces are interconnected and experienced often simultaneously. At the same time, the online sphere cannot be seen as a derivative or an extension of the offline sphere as it is heterogeneous and thus mutually irreducible (Boellstorff, 2012). This difference is well documented in HS studies, which show that online HS has recognized distinctive characteristics, such as anonymity or the speed and intensity of engagement (Brown, 2018; Leonhard et al., 2018).

On the other hand, from the everyday victim’s perspective, some differences may be blurred, for example, between (online) HS and cyberbullying (Obermaier et al., 2023; Rudnicki and Vandebosch, 2023). Cyberbullying is assumed to be a repeated affair based on a power imbalance, whereas HS can be a one-off affair focused on attacking collective identity (Wachs et al., 2019, p. 180). Thus, while there are many instances where cyberbullying differs from HS, we also see a relatively large area where the two phenomena may overlap, both in the reasons for the attack, in their longevity and in being experienced concurrently by victims.

Situating our attitude in line with this position and reflecting the overall aims of the project that this research was part of (see below), we have designed our research to pursue three research questions:

RQ 1: How do our respondents experience and understand HS and its harms in its everydayness?

RQ 2: How does experiencing HS affect how people live and move spatially in both the online and offline worlds?

RQ 3: What is the respondents’ experience with everyday support in the social and civic sphere?

4 Methodology and ethical research considerations

The primary method used in our research is semi-structured interviews (N=33) conducted in 2021 with research participants from four European countries: the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy and Portugal. The research design reflects regional specificities as it tries to encompass the perspective of both old and new EU countries and the different historical frameworks in post-colonial/post-fascist/post-socialist regions. The Czech Republic represents a relatively stable, standard democracy within the post-socialist region. Its attitudes and policies towards discrimination and HS were mainly developed after 1989 and then adapted to the European policy framework after 2003. However, similar to other post-socialist countries in the region, it has been, for most of the twentieth century, a country with closed borders and, therefore, until today, relatively homogenous, with low rates of immigration compared to Western European countries. Portugal is comparable to the Czech Republic in terms of the size/number of inhabitants and current economic situation, but it has a very different history regarding immigration as it was part of the European colonial order. Germany and Italy, on the other hand, are large countries with strong economies and a history of involvement in fascism/Nazism that has shaped their policies to the present. Both are also challenged by clear internal economic divisions (north/south in Italy, west/east in Germany) and are the leading immigration destinations in Europe. In this regard, we consider the selection of these countries not as representative in terms of the conditions of HS but as diverse yet meaningful in presenting the diversity of everyday experiences with hate speech.

The methodological process of our research is also partly determined by the fact that it was conducted as part of a larger applied project, and our analysis was designed in a way that could inform policy briefs and education activities in the later stage of the project. In the first phase of the empirical research, we conducted an overview of (a) existing research on HS in each country and (b) an overview of available policy documents on HS and discrimination policy documents in each country and on the European level. We also conducted several informal expert interviews and roundtable debates with our project partners from the NGO sector in the respective partner countries. This first phase of the research revealed two important points that determined the setup of the interviews.

Firstly, we found that concrete national policies vary with respect to the characteristics they include in HS definitions; for example, while gender identity and sexual orientation are part of Germany’s anti-discrimination legislation, that is not the case in the Czech Republic. The final choice of respondents is thus not the same in each country; instead, it reflects the situation in each respective country—based on existing data, for instance, we know that LGBTQ+ people are often targeted in Italy, whereas in the Czech Republic, Muslim women who wear a scarf are frequently attacked. However, in line with the focus of our study—the omnipresence and everydayness of HS in Europe—the diversity of respondents was our main criterion. Apart from the country of residence, this includes different occupations to reflect the different social statuses and income brackets of the respondents (Sewell et al., 1957; Bourdieu, 2005), gender identities that play an important role in how people experience HS and age (for example, Eckert, 2018), reflecting experiences with different types of HS based on racism, sexism, Islamophobia and so on. Our approach is not comparative, neither among countries nor social groups, as the qualitative nature of the research and the sample size do not allow for meaningful comparison. We aimed instead to capture the diversity of everydayness of HS as a life situation and the diversity of responses to it.

We relied on the field experience of our research assistants in each respective country to identify and recruit respondents. The assistants were instructed to base their selection mainly on the diversity of HS experiences (see above). Additionally, the snowball method was used where some respondents recommended other people they knew who had had experiences of HS (for example, colleagues or members of support networks). The aim was to conduct 6 to 10 interviews in each country until we reached the data saturation point.

Secondly, from the desk research and informal expert interviews and also following the project’s overall aim (to mediate the experience of living with HS to policymakers and educators), we identified key themes that we needed to cover in the empirical research: the everydayness of HS and its repetitive nature and, connected to that, the long-term effects of HS on the everyday from the perspective of its victims, the spatiality across online and offline spaces and experiences with support networks. Subsequently, these themes informed our main research questions (see above) and were reflected in the structure of the interviews. The interviews also contained questions about the nature of support networks and coping strategies that were not analyzed for this study, as they were aimed to inform the educational and policy activities conducted within the project (and therefore, are not reflected in the research questions stated above). The interview guide can be found in Appendix 1.

All interviews were conducted in the national languages of the respective countries where the respondents live (CZ, DE, PT, IT). The interviews were then transcribed and translated into English. The transcriptions were organized following a template to classify the data across national contexts. The templates with interview transcripts were consequently manually coded using open coding (Rivas, 2012). During the coding process, the following categories emerged: (i) HS experienced as an everyday flow, (ii) long-term effects experienced as cumulative desensitization, (iii) the specific forms of spatiality with a focus on the continuous interconnection between online and offline spaces and (iv) the ambivalence of social support and the absence of civil support. The empirical part of this study is organized in line with these categories.

At the same time, a thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) was conducted to identify key themes within each interview and an analysis of the frequency of each category. In the interviews, our respondents talked about more of their experiences with HS incidents, which allowed us to quantify issues related to the reasons for HS and where our respondents most frequently encountered it.

The interviews were conducted in each respective country by research assistants who were either researchers or social workers dealing with discrimination, racism and hate speech or professionals in the NGO sector. Their background provided a baseline level of ethical understanding of the situation HS victims face. Before the data collection started in September 2021, we organized an in-person workshop for all partners involved in the data collection (recruiting and interviews) to discuss and establish guidelines for creating a safe space for the respondents throughout the process, such as sensitive language, available psychological intervention, the possibility to withdraw from the process at any time and so forth.

Written informed consent was obtained from all research participants. However, as many research participants are vulnerable, we opted for pseudonymization. All names and defining characteristics of the research participants were changed to protect their privacy and prevent further exposure to hate speech acts.

5 Findings

6 Conclusion and discussion: Towards a society of civil courage and mutual aid across online and offline spaces

To better grasp the omnipresence of hate speech in contemporary Europe, we believe studies of HS dynamics, harms and support systems need to expand their theoretical apparatus with proper concepts of the everyday. We did so here with the help of anthropological concepts, which enabled us to grasp HS not as an act but as a daily life experience. With the conceptual shift towards the everyday, we investigated several of its important components—how it is understood by respondents, its long-term dynamics and spatiality issues, with a particular focus on the correlation between online and offline spheres and the proper support system for everyday life. Our main findings are summarized below.

People do articulate the everyday presence of HS differently. However, hate speech as a flow is, we argue, a shared understanding, and as such, it complements a different modality of experiences, of HS as an act. Moreover, hate speech as an act needs to be understood as a political technology of the state for processing discrimination. As the everyday is a temporal category of durability, long-term dynamics matter tremendously. We document in this regard that processes of cumulative desensitization need to be considered in lives impacted by HS. People accumulate experiences of discrimination and, simultaneously, become desensitized by them. This seriously affects their quality of life and may create a specific dynamic of eventual outbursts of strong responses to hate. Usually treated separately in HS literature, we believe that cumulation and desensitization should be understood as an interconnected process. Furthermore, the everyday omnipresence is a spatial quality as well since people do change how and when they move through public spaces, whether online or offline. Most people experience HS across online and offline settings with the Internet seen as only one of many spaces, albeit with particular features. On the one hand, offline HS harms more—especially when it reaches inside the private spheres of homes. On the other hand, there has been an increase in online HS experiences recently, which, however, tend to be belittled as not being real enough.

What possible applications does the focus on the everyday and our findings suggest? Contrary to our conclusions, police and courts usually process hate speech only for specific cases—concrete acts and concrete comments. However, if microevents are isolated from the overall and long-lasting HS flow, proving the severity of the impact can be tricky (Calvert, 1997). Consequently, state institutions become incapable of grasping what it means to live with everyday hate speech as well as its long-term effects of cumulative desensitization. We agree with Gelber and McNamara that “regulatory models ought to recognize these … enduring … effects” (2016, p. 325). One possible way to do so might be to treat HS as an issue of toxicity, and we agree here with Brown when he draws “parallels between the cumulative effects of hate speech and the cumulative effects of asbestosis or industrial deafness or other dose-based diseases” (2015, p. 58).

However, when Gelber and McNamara write about mitigating the harmful effects of hate speech, they rely on a regulatory framework. Respecting the victim’s perspective, hate speech, we argue, needs primarily to be highlighted, researched and addressed in its domain; that is, in everyday life, where it tends to erode. HS often goes unnoticed, as it happens daily, invisibly, through small acts and gestures, and it remains unreported and thus unofficial and unreachable via legislative measures. In this sense, it is not only a problem of regulation but, above all, a problem of everyday informal support. Although respondents differed in their many answers, there was one thing about which they were unanimous—a call for more immediate support from bystanders and witnesses. Max captured it when evaluating one of his recent significant experiences with hate speech: “It would have helped if someone had said something like ‘shut up’ and then others had stepped in. Looking back, that is what I would have wished for.” As our findings add evidence to the ambivalent character of social support from families and friends (Noh and Kaspar, 2003; Ortiz, 2019), the everyday support of fellow citizens is crucial in mitigating the effects of hate speech.

When the problem is in the everydayness of HS, people standing up for its victims in everyday situations is the primary means to prevent the proliferation of hate speech. Recent literature in HS studies targets many issues of online bystander intervention, including digital civic courage (Obermaier, 2022) and solidarity citizenship (Kunst et al., 2021), and urges a focus on sensitization processes (Soral et al., 2022). Building on these but also expanding away from them, we suggest sensitization activities for families, friends and citizens could focus on explaining HS as an everyday flow, whereby processes of cumulative desensitization beyond a specific event matter crucially (Feagin, 1991). Furthermore, faced with the challenges of a hate speech epidemic, civil courage and mutual aid are indeed principles worth cultivating in European society, but preferably across online and offline contexts.

Regarding future research on life with hate, we see three possible avenues to explore, each a kind of self-critique of the approach developed in this text.

First, we suggest focusing on relationalities between HS as an act and a flow of “living hated”, which should be explored ethnographically. This is relevant in the personal lives of HS targets and in daily interactions with others, including the state, nongovernmental institutions, peers, families, friends and citizens. As our research documents, treating hate speech as an act goes well beyond being a neutral analytical process. Thus, long-term ethnographic research of everyday life with hate could mediate misunderstandings when interacting with HS targets. This presupposes moving methodologically beyond the interview-only approach as well as fully immersing the researcher in the field without relying on research assistants and translation processes.

Second, we identify the challenge in analysing the dynamics of online-offline spaces while avoiding epistemological presumptions of their default radical differences or radical sameness. Further research needs to keep tracing their mutual relations in concrete empirical settings. Moreover, it is crucial to investigate and document how and by whom online-offline dynamics are articulated as either radically identical or separate. Regarding the latter, an important phenomenon emerged which is still to be properly researched—whereas hate speech is often deemed not so serious because it is only a verbal or singular act, yet another dimension of belittlement emerges in online-offline dynamics: hate speech is considered not so serious because it is only virtual.

Third, this research aimed to document commonalities in daily life with hate across varied European contexts and social milieus. The sample was too small to focus on differences between different social groups, not to mention whole countries. Nevertheless, some interesting differences emerged in our data which could become possible hypotheses for future research, for instance, concerning issues of politicization vs personalization; that is, where, by whom, and how the problem of everyday life with hate is mobilized as a political problem to be tackled by political means (Italy, Portugal, Germany) or as a personal problem to be instead tackled through psychiatric therapies (Germany, the Czech Republic). Quantitative surveys on everyday harms and supports could provide data suitable for a comparative study and dig deeper into cultural and political differences in the framings and practices of and against hate speech in historically different parts of Europe.