Hate Speech and Polarization in Participatory Society

Marta Pérez-Escolar, José Manuel Noguera-Vivo, Marta Pérez-Escolar, José Manuel Noguera-Vivo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000462883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Journalisme

This timely volume offers a comprehensive and rigorous overview of the role of communication in the construction of hate speech and polarization in the online and offline arena.

Delving into the meanings, implications, contexts and effects of extreme speech and gated communities in the media landscape, the chapters analyse misleading metaphors and rhetoric via focused case studies to understand how we can overcome the risks and threats stemming from the past decade's defining communicative phenomena. The book brings together an international team of experts, enabling a broad, multidisciplinary approach that examines hate speech, dislike, polarization and enclave deliberation as cross axes that influence offline and digital conversations. The diverse case studies herein offer insights into international news media, television drama and social media in a range of contexts, suggesting an academic frame of reference for examining this emerging phenomenon within the field of communication studies.

Offering thoughtful and much-needed analysis, this collection will be of great interest to scholars and students working in communication studies, media studies, journalism, sociology, political science, political communication and cultural industries.

1 Introduction to the dilemmas and struggles of participatory society

Marta Pérez-Escolar and José Manuel Noguera-Vivo

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109891-1

Tracing complex realities

The term ‘participatory society’ has traditionally had positive connotations and has even been associated with a more democratic, fair and equal civilization. Drawing upon the cyber-optimistic perspective (Dahlgren, 2000, 2005, 2011, 2012; Rheingold, 2000, 2002; Sánchez, 2001; Davis, Elin & Reeher, 2002; Lévy, 2004; Surowiecki, 2005; Siedschlag, 2007; Mossberger et al., 2008; Castells, 2010, 2013; Borge & Cardenal, 2011; Sampedro & Sánchez, 2011; Jenkins, Ford & Green, 2013; Herreros, 2013; Vilché, 2015; Jenkins, 2016), the digital realm offers new forms of participation in such a way that contributes to the progress of society and the evolution of citizenship; individuals have the power to change the current landscape positively by encouraging sustainable practices and empathic behaviors. However, participation is also a tricky empowerment tool, since a participatory society does not always represent an open democratic model, but could also serve as a catalyst for reinforcing hate speech, increasing ideological polarization and spreading disinformation.

Multiple authors have already warned about the disadvantages that arise in participatory society due to the peculiarities and traits of online scenarios: Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson (1996) proposed the term ‘cyberbalkanization’ to describe the fragmentation of the internet into special interest groups. Users interact with only like-minded others and “thereby close themselves off from ideological opposition, alternative understandings, and uncomfortable discussions” (Brainard, 2009, p. 598). According to Putnam (2001), “real world interactions often force us to deal with diversity, whereas the virtual world may be more homogeneous, not in demographic terms, but in terms of interest and outlook. Place-based communities may be supplanted by interest-based communities” (Putnam, 2001, p. 178). This strong ideological polarization (Stroud, 2007, 2008) favors the growth of communication cyber-ghettos in which users tend to support their own points of view and criticize opposing ones (Johnson, Bichard & Zhang, 2009).

Thus, the current digital environment is creating a spiral of selective attention (Neuman, Bimber & Hindman, 2011, p. 34): users actively seek out information that supports their opinions and beliefs and avoid interacting with people who challenge their existing convictions (Redlawsk, 2002; Taber & Lodge, 2006). The ‘selective exposure’ theory (Festinger, 1957) also describes this online phenomenon as a way to reduce dissonance in online communities: individuals select news, information, interactions and relations that reinforce their existing attitudes and mindset, and reject dissident, alternative or opposing speeches (Zillmann & Bryant, 1985; Chaffee et al., 2001; Mutz & Martin, 2001; Best, Chmielewski & Krueger, 2005; Stroud, 2007, 2008; Cinelli et al., 2020; Johnson et al., 2020; Parmelee & Roman, 2020; Stier et al., 2020).

Similarly, Thompson (2008) argues that “if the participants are mostly like-minded or hold the same views before they enter into the discussion, they are not situated in the circumstances of deliberation” (p. 502). When like-minded people simply follow the beliefs provided by the members of the same deliberating group and only have discussions with one other, then these polarized communities are engaged in ‘enclave deliberation’ (Sunstein, 2000, 2008, 2009), where disinformation, misinformation, rumors and hate speech may be amplified due to the lack of contrary evidence (Grönlund, Herne & Setälä, 2015) and by groups of users living in ‘echo chambers’ (Sunstein, 2008). This results in an increased ideological polarization, extremist behaviors and a deep information bias.

One of the most representative and recent examples of the dark side of participatory society was the attack on the US Capitol at the beginning of January 2021. After the 2020 presidential elections, Donald Trump repeated false claims of electoral fraud, stating that he had won the ‘legal vote’. This conspiracy theory pushed thousands of pro-Trump extremists to carry out a violent invasion of one of the most iconic American buildings, seeking to fight against the election of Joe Biden. The mob of Donald Trump’s supporters was mainly made up of members of different right-wing nationalist extremist groups, like the Proud Boys, Qanon or ‘rednecks’, among others, who firmly believed Trump’s false statements and rejected evidence or proof that challenged their existing convictions outright.

For that reason, when polarized ideological ghettos magnify information disorders (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017) and reinforce outrageous behaviors, like the assault on the US Capitol, it is essential to start counterattacking the falsehood, combating hate speech and breaking up social segregation and political fragmentation. Twitter, for example, has permanently suspended the official account of Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” (Twitter, 2021) as well as the great amount of misleading information he disseminated. According to Newtral, a Spanish fact-checking media, Donald Trump has spread 29,508 false or deceitful statements in 1,386 days (Baeza, 2021). In addition, Parler – the social network used by pro-Trump extremists to spread hatred – went offline after Amazon suspended it from its server hosting; Google Play and Apple both also decided to remove the social media platform from their app stores. Furthermore, Wikipedia has just published the Universal Code of Conduct to provide a baseline of behavior based on mutual respect, civility, collegiality, mutual support and good citizenship, thus condemning harassment, abuse of power, privilege, influence, content vandalism and abuse of the projects (Wikipedia, 2021).

In the same spirit of these initiatives, the main contribution of this book is to offer a context whereby it is understood that the democratizing and empowering functions of the digital realm are being exaggerated and a more realistic perspective is needed to face the communicative, social, cultural and political problems of our era. This book is written for anyone with academic or professional interests in media representations of polarization and hate speech, as well as their consequences in many different international contexts. The studies included in this volume confirm that it is relevant to adopt a cyber-realistic perspective when we discuss the revolutionary and emancipatory potential participatory society has for changing the current landscape. Thus, by drawing on different theoretical concepts, focusing on various methods and meeting a broad range of research problems, the chapters included here shape the nature and the character of contemporary participatory society. More precisely, the book is structured according to three perspectives on the complex world of hate speech, ideological polarization and their consequences: contextualizing participatory society: metaphors for polarization and hate speech; political and ideological polarization; and hate speech in social, traditional, and community media.

Contextualizing participatory society: metaphors for polarization and hate speech

The perspective of the authors in the first section of this book is the widest because they tackle broad aspects of participatory society. The chapters in this section encompass different approaches to the complex connections in participatory society, and the particular linkages forged between ideological polarization, disinformation and hate speech. By placing their analyses in the political context of Spain, Marta Pérez-Escolar and José Manuel Noguera-Vivo evaluate in the first chapter some of the most popular Spanish political leaders’ false statements. The authors conclude that fabricated contents – misinformation or disinformation – nourish the diversification of opinions, because citizens only perceive a frame of reality that is distorted and divides people into multiple polarized groups. As a consequence, the act of lying increases what the authors call diversification of polarization, which refers to people becoming isolated in multiple bubble cyber-ghettos depending upon the nature of the issue under debate (e.g. inequality between sexes, climate change, immigration issues, the high prices of rent or the Catalonian independence movement, among others). Therefore, diversification of polarization increases the number of enemies and reduces the possibilities of achieving consensus. As a consequence, the diversification of polarization increasingly hinders the possibilities for raising a collective understanding, as well as weakening the values of a democracy based on mutual respect, tolerance and equality.

In the following chapter, Axel Bruns critically argues that ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ principally constitute an unfounded moral panic that presents a convenient technological scapegoat for a much more critical, fundamentally human-made problem: growing social and political polarization. Bruns affirms that the ‘echo chamber’ and ‘filter bubble’ metaphors are doing us a fundamental disservice by misdirecting our attention to online platforms as the root cause of these problems. The rise of hyper-partisan, populist and illiberal ideological agitators and propagandists from the fringes of the political spectrum, and their rejection of established democratic principles and processes, is not principally a phenomenon related to the communications technologies they use; it is, centrally, a societal problem. For that reason, the author conveys that our continuing debate about ill-considered metaphors such as ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ is a distraction that we can no longer afford, because it keeps us from confronting far more important matters head-on. Therefore, the central question now is what they do with such information when they encounter it. This is the debate we need to have: not a proxy argument about the impact of platforms and algorithms, but a meaningful discussion about the complex and compound causes of political and societal polarization. The ‘echo chamber’ and ‘filter bubble’ metaphors have kept us from pursuing that debate and must now be put to rest.

Liriam Sponholz provides a taxonomy of hate speech in digital conversations, allowing an identification of how hate speech manifests in online conversations, how these forms can be assessed empirically and what differentiated effects they have on online deliberation. Her findings suggest that different subsets of hate speech incorporated in different digital objects also have differentiated consequences for deliberative processes. For example, hateful speech may affect how respectfully participants deal with each other in digital conversations, while in the case of hate-fueled speech, ‘true believers’ may justify assertions and validity claims by packaging their group-libeling positions in argumentation processes. Hatred-inciting speech provokes debates where speakers submit the worthiness of human beings to processes of argumentation. Sponholz conveys that online hate speech poses a specific threat to democracy...