Six months in this island have already gone and so far it has been an intense, slow but improving learning process. Thinking about the target audience who can end up reading the articles in this blog, I would like to give a brief insight of what I have been doing as part of the R&D Department during my ESC project.
This article briefly presents one of the projects I have been working on since the beginning of my experience.
#HateTrackers Beyond Borders is a European funded project, carried alongside other NGOs settled in Italy, Spain, Greece, and of course Cyprus. The aim of the project is to promote active citizenship, civic engagement and activism regarding one of the most relevant topics of our present: hate speech.
Hatred, in particular online hate speech is a topic that has blown up, and has gained the attention of scholars, international organizations and institutions only in the last 30 years.
The reason why the issue has generated (and it is generating) so much debate is the raise and expansion and the mediatic, social, economic, and geopolitical growing importance of the virtual- cyberspace as a parallel and unregulated space but which is deeply rooted into the society and whose effect are widely visible in the “offline world”; the social media.
Social media were not born with the intent to connect people, their main goal claimed by many scholars, is to sell. For functioning they are regulated by algorithms, sets of rules that classify, determine, and organize the visible contents on social platforms based on the interactions, reactions how much a post is shared and spread through the online platforms. Here is the core problem of hate speech: the emotional contents generate more interactions than any other post. Besides this, the rise of social media in the last 30 years has been accompanied by the proliferation of racist, discriminatory, sexist, xenophobic, misogynist, and homophobic ideologies perpetrated mainly by far-right political parties and groups. A crucial factor for the divulgation of hate messages is the wide range of choices with which online contents can be created. For example, on social media it is possible to convey hate messages through memes, emoji, reels, gifs, or to make use of anonymity through fake profiles. Also, the use of artificial intelligence is a powerful tool for creating fake contents.
Many scholars have pointed out the dangerous effects of exposure to hate speech. For instance, derogatory speech in public has the effect of depriving and disrupting the moral integrity, personality and identity of the target towards whom it is directed. It can create feelings of fear, disempowerment, exclusion, dehumanization, silencing, as well as feelings of anger and the exacerbation of discriminatory prejudices.
Being frequently bombarded by fake news that portrays a social group in a certain way, can led users to be discriminatory towards the targeted group at every level of the civil society. At individual level the users will put distance from who belong to the discriminated group. In a pejorative level they can start using offensive language while referring to that group. At the highest level they may act by advocating harsh, exclusive contrary policies aimed at that group. On the side of the victim of hateful messages, studies have shown that frequent exposure to violence or violent behavior leads the subject to perceive acts of violence as less severe, less serious, which can lead to apathy towards violent events/facts, even to the point of subconsciously considering violence as the norm.
The Council of Europe drafted a pyramid of hate which start with the basements composed by stereotypes which ends with the hate crimes, or worse with the genocide at the top.
Hate speech is considered to be the step prior hate crimes, and there’s no need to cite some examples as in the bloody XX century has already shown the dangerousness of some ideologies.
Hate speech is a problem that needs to be counteract now, in at any level. The project #HateTrackers aims to do it at the level of the civil society by creating a community of activist who aim to bring a counteractive narrative towards it with all the skills they have (art, music, education, online content creators and so on). If you are interested in you can go on #HateTrackers website to discover more and to click here if you would like to get involved.