Volume 49, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Online Hate: A European Communication Perspective Guest Editors: Heidi Vandebosch and Tobias Rothmund

The article builds on current research into the effects and harms of hate speech in the lives of its victims. It introduces the anthropological concept of everyday violence to focus on hate speech as an everyday experience as opposed to a sequence of separate hate speech acts. Methodologically, the study is based on a qualitative approach and analyses data collected via semi-structured interviews (N=33) with people who have experienced hate speech in four EU member states (Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic and Portugal). The analysis documents four overlapping themes of how hate speech manifests as the everyday experience of “living hated”—hate speech as a flow; its spatial dimension of moving across online and offline contexts; its long-term effects, leading to what we call “cumulative desensitization” (aggravated during the COVID-19 pandemic); and the role of support systems and their (in)effectiveness. The article concludes by suggesting possible applications as well as avenues for future research that could provide a deeper understanding of hate speech as the daily life experience of its targets.

Social media platforms have become crucial channels for radical right populist leaders to broadcast anti-immigrant views. These politicians employ various rhetorical appeals, such as pathos (emotional language), logos (logical arguments), and ethos (speaker credibility), to sway public opinion. This study considers the anti-immigrant rhetoric of prominent European populist radical right leaders across X, Instagram, and Facebook, analysing the prevalence of these rhetorical strategies across different platforms. From the perspective of mediatization theory, politicians can adjust their messages to fit with the design and formats of various social media platforms. Party leaders often resort to emotional appeals on X, with its limited space for communication, as well as on Facebook, where emotional interaction buttons and discussion features can encourage emotional rhetoric as well. Logical appeals (logos) are common on platforms such as Facebook and X, which offer options to easily share information in the form of texts and links. Additionally, ethos, associated with speaker’s credibility, is common in posts on platforms that facilitate closer engagement with the party leaders’ constituents, such as Facebook and Instagram. These findings underscore the importance of considering platform design when shaping political communication strategies.

Visual content captures attention, is easy to understand, and is more likely to be remembered. However, it is not limited to conveying informative content; it can also be used to propagate hate. While existing research has predominantly focused on textual hate speech, this study aims to address a research gap by analyzing the characteristics of visual hate, including its channels, intensity, sources, and targets, through a standardized manual content analysis. The hate images were collected through the citizen science approach of data donation. Findings highlight that transgender individuals and migrants are the primary targets of visual hate. It reveals a presence of hate images not only on communication platforms but also in various intermediaries and journalistic media. Half of these images use factual or humorous methods to discriminate against individuals or groups, while an equal number adopt a highly aggressive tone. The study suggests governance measures to combat this issue effectively.

Hate is widespread online, hits everyone, and carries negative consequences. Crowd moderation—user-assisted moderation through, e. g., reporting or counter-speech—is heralded as a potential remedy. We explore this potential by linking insights on online bystander interventions to the analogy of crowd moderation as a (lost) public good. We argue that the distribution of costs and benefits of engaging in crowd moderation forecasts a collective action problem. If the individual crowd member has limited incentive to react when witnessing hate, crowd moderation is unlikely to manifest. We explore this argument empirically, investigating several preregistered hypotheses about the distribution of individual-level costs and benefits of response options to online hate using a large, nationally representative survey of Danish social media users (N = 24,996). In line with expectations, we find that bystander reactions, especially costly reactions, are rare. Furthermore, we find a positive correlation between exposure to online hate and withdrawal motivations, and a negative (n-shaped) correlation with bystander reactions.

Drawing on theories related to interpersonal and intergroup behavior, this study investigated effects of personality traits (i.e., empathy and identity insecurity) and attitudes (i.e., anti-migration attitudes and social dominance orientation) on the perceived severity of digital hate against immigrants in Austria. Findings of autoregressive path modeling using two-wave panel data revealed that empathic suffering and egalitarianism positively predicted perceived severity, while anti-migrant attitudes exhibited a negative prediction. In terms of interactions between personality and attitudes, we observed that the prediction of empathic suffering becomes less relevant for egalitarian individuals, which indicates an overwriting process that might be a promising way to counteract socially harmful digital hate perceptions. Implications for research on annotation tasks and hate interventions are discussed.