Hate speech and social media: Combating a dangerous relationship

From Firenze University Press Journal: Media Education

Francesca Rizzuto, Università di Palermo

The contemporary biased use of information has peculiar characteristics in comparison with the traditional spread of fake news as a political weapon to discredit an adversary: the Internet and social media have made possible an extraordinary expansion for accessing information at a planetary level, offering an almost unlimited cognitive resources available to all citizens. The circulation of false news (Albright 2017; Corner 2017), favoured by unaware users, as well as the frequent intentional construction of coordinated disinformation campaigns impose global attention on the topic of the new opacity of the borders between freedom of expression and the need to limit manipulation of information flows. As a matter of fact, the infosphere is dominated by the ‘opaque’ algorithms elaborated by the platforms (Van Dijck et al., 2018), which are private, transnational companies, founded on the logic of profit and often operating in a context without ‘rules’, with little or no attention to the risks of the disinformation strategies (Bracciale & Grisolia 2020) or viralization of harmful fake news (Ireton & Posetti 2018). In this article it is argued that the problem of the recent increasing spread of hate speech can be con-nected to the new challenges brought about by the rise of social media as central actors in the public sphere. We are immersed in a hyperfragmented, platformized commu-nicative ecosystem, which inevitably creates biases, due to the structural logic of algorithms so that people see what they want to see or what an algorithm ‘believes’ that they are interested in seeing (Chambers, 2021), producing a variety of emerging phenomena, including political polar-ization and echo chambers, which often promote the rise of hate speech and, in general, of violence. Consequently, new significant risks to Western constitutional architec-tures appear, such as ‘normalizing’ stringent censorship practices or, for totally different purposes, favouring con-flicting communication dynamics (Heinze, 2016; Sorice, 2020; Vaccaro, 2020). In this context, as Alkiviadou (2019) underlined, the recent increase of online threats and hate speech confirms the presence of a new dangerous communicative circuit, capable of spreading and exponentially multiplying highly negative and divisive contents, with no precise normative borders or rules in many coun-tries. Social media are more and more used as the central axis and source of information so that the power of communication technologies to reach strategic audiences has become a central key to influence public opinion; therefore, the proliferation of verbal attacks on line poses concrete risks to democratic participation not only at an institutional level (to combat them), but also in terms of the journalistic profession, since the reputational crisis of many institutions, added to the disinformation increase, has led to a general loss of confidence in the newsmedia ability to ‘tell’ facts (McIntyre, 2018; Lorusso 2018; Riz-zuto 2021). These relevant changes require innovative and adequate legislative actions to face the toxic transforma-tion of the democratic debate emerged in many Western contexts and too often encouraged by political leaders (Heinze, 2016; Bentivegna & Boccia Artieri, 2021): on one hand, it is evident the presence of normalizing commu-nicative practices, aiming at a reassuring anesthetization of citizen-users and at avoiding crisis; on the other, in a diametrically opposite direction, a continuous appeal to the emotional sphere of individuals is too often used to arouse anger and hate, useful to precise political strategies (Rossini, 2020). In both cases, however, there is always a clear detachment from recourse to rationality and dia-logue in the production of information which, in the transmedia dynamics (Mc Erlean, 2018), helps processes of virilisation capable of destroying political careers, as well as damaging citizens, whose right to privacy protec-tion is strongly menaced (Rizzuto, Sciarrino 2021). All these levels of problems impose a reflection on the poten-tial consequences of contemporary information disorders not only at a theorical level (all traditional interpretative schemes now seem inadequate), but also to promote inno-vative and effective educational policies for the young generations of citizens (Cappello & Rizzuto 2020). The following pages aim to propose a reflection on the con-figuration of the contemporary digital agorà as a powerful ‘hate factory’, focusing on the dangers of effects deriving from pervasive and planetary practices of divisive news construction and sharing. In the first part of this article, it will be argued that the increase of lexical choices based on hate or verbal violence must be connected to the characteristics of the contemporary hybrid media system and considered as a concrete threat for democracies, as well as a challenge for institutions to find innovative ways to face them at a legislative and a cultural level. Moreover, stopping attacks aiming to ridicule, or even destroy, individuals, must be connected to the goal of reaffirming the responsibilities of news professionals, since the possi-bilities of the digital context impose them a greater ability to decentralize the journalistic professional gaze not to become agents, more or less ‘unaware’, of the construction of hate or of its normalization as an “acceptable” communicative dynamics in relationships among individuals as well as among leaders, peoples, states. In the second part of the article, some EU recent normative actions against hate speech will be presented: from all these institutional initiatives clearly emerges the need to reinforce the legal framework for tackling hate speech and discrimination, focusing on the normative lack of strict rules in many European countries. Finally, the “Code on hate speech”, promoted by Italian Authority for Communications (AGCOM, 2022), will be presented in order to underline some links with European political debate and actions: this document has shown a concrete institutional attention to the problem of hate speech in Italy and established the binding criteria for the programming of Italian audio-visual media service providers, in order to prevent and combat it both in information and entertainment.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/me-14992

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