The expression of hate online—racism, sexism, religious bigotry, xenophobia, and other forms—is widely recognized as one of the biggest problems with social media and society today. Traditional perspectives on online hate producers tend to focus on the personality traits of senders, an approach that fails to consider the inherently social nature of social media. New, groundbreaking research on online hate puts the potent influence of social forces among and between online aggressors center-stage. The social interaction among online hate producers, itself, may actually provide much of the impetus for the generation of online hate.
A social process approach assumes that patterns of interactive social behavior reinforce, magnify, or modify the expression of hate online. It also considers the characteristics of social media that facilitate social interactions that promote hate and facilitate relationships among haters.
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Synopsis of Chapters
“Introduction to Social Processes of Online Hate” by Joseph B. Walther and Ronald E. Rice charts a course for examining how hate messaging in social media results from communicative interactions among hate posters and the affordances of social media, and why such an approach is interesting: how what appears individual is actually social, and what appears unorganized is actually highly organized. It re-orients the study of online hate in ways that the entire volume illuminates.
“Making a Case for Social Processes Approach to Online Hate” by Joseph B. Walther argues that the audience of online hate messaging is other online haters, more so than the ostensible victims who the messages refer to. Compelling anecdotes and empirical studies on the language, placement, and other characteristics of online hate suggest that its primary purpose is to entertain and nurture relations among haters. Social processes better explain online hate than do traditional, personality-based approaches.
“Foundations, Definitions, and Directions in Online Hate Research” by Stephanie Tong provides a comprehensive overview of findings related to the prevalence of online hate, its various content and message characteristics, and the effects of online hate on those who experience it. It offers a new taxonomy of hate messaging behavior depending on the targets and the publicness of social media hate.
“Misogyny and Woman Abuse in the Incelosphere: The Role of Online Incel Male Peer Support” by Walter S. DeKeseredy describes how incels, or involuntarily celibate males, use online community to share their invectives against “Stacys” (women who resist their sexual advances) and “Chads” (men who are sexually active). The chapter applies male peer support theory to explain how, online, incels console each other and rationalize one another’s hatred toward others.
“From Echo Chambers to Digital Campfires: The Making of an Online Community of Hate in Stormfront” by Anton and Petter Törnberg examines participation in one of the longest-standing interaction sites explicitly for white nationalists, Stormfront.org. They describe how Stormfront provides its participants community through story-telling, and how new participants’ language converges over time toward that of veteran users, as their expressions and worldviews about other races and religions become uniformly extreme.
“‘Deal’ of the Day: Sex, Porn and Political Hate on Social Media” by Sahana Udupa and Oeendrila L. Gerold begins with an account of fake auctions of Muslim women online in India unbeknownst to the women whose pictures were stolen. The essay and its original data analyses explore the overlapping social forces of religious majoritarianism, the pornification of online culture, and other factors that feed hatred toward Muslims and women online, veiled in techno-entertainment and fun.
“’Hate Parties’: Networked Antisemitism from the Fringes to YouTube” by Steven Rea, Binny Mathew, and Jordan Kraemer investigates cross-platform hate, when users post messages on a fringe platform linking to and encouraging comments on a different, mainstream platform. The strongest antisemitic fringe postings linked not to Jewish targets but to antisemitic YouTube videos, where visitors posted additional disparaging remarks. Hate producers use multiple social media platforms to evade content restrictions on some platforms but not on others, to keep a single conversation going in different social spaces.
“Detecting Anti-Social Norms in Large-Scale Online Discussions” by Yotam Shmargad, Stephen A. Rains, Kevin Coe, Kate Kenski, , and Steven Bethard looks at anti-social commenting on news sites generally and on social network platforms during the January 6, 2020 attack on the US Capitol. They describe how norms for toxic postings emerge through the patterns of encouragements, or “upvotes” that others’ toxic comments receive, and the effects of upvotes on one’s own continued toxic postings.
“Understanding the Phases of Coordinated Online Aggression Attacks” by Gianluca Stringhini and Jeremy Blackburn use computational records to examine sequences of events and emergent activities that occur in organized, deliberate, group-based efforts to attack victims with hate postings. They describe five stages of these attacks that are planned and managed on a fringe platforms but carried out on mainstream platforms, and the feedback messages attackers leave to enhance and celebrate the attacks on YouTube or their “Zoombombing” efforts.
Editors:
Joseph B. Walther, Bertelsen Presidential Chair of Technology and Society, Distinguished Professor of Communication, University of California at Santa Barbara; 2023-2024 Visiting Scholar, Institute for Rebooting Social Media, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
Ronald E. Rice, the Arthur N. Rupe Chair in Social Effects of Mass Communication, Distinguished Professor of Communication, University of California at Santa Barbara
