Webinar provides unique perspective on hate speech
It’s increasingly difficult to practice peace journalism in a media landscape saturated with hate speech. That’s why I decided to go back to school this week to dig a little deeper into the subject.

Wednesday, the GWU Media and Peacebuilding Project and Project Over Zero sponsored a webinar, “Potentials and limits of strategies to redefine hate speech.” Speakers Iginio Gagliardone  and Matti Pohjonen, both professors, discussed their study of hate speech on Facebook in Ethiopia.

There has been extensive media coverage in the US about how Facebook has stoked ethnic violence in Ethiopia during the last year (NPR and CNN, for example). In contrast, the Gagliardone/Pohjonen study conducted in 2015 before the current conflict, showed very little hate speech. They looked at 1055 popular Ethiopian Facebook pages, and found that only 2.2% contained offensive, hate, or dangerous speech. The speakers noted, and I agree, that the same study conducted today would have drastically different findings, given the incendiary nature of the current Tigray conflict.

Especially interesting was how the research team defined hate speech for the purposes of their study. Their study analyzed and coded for “statements that go against” (attacking, malice, threat; conflict producing/maintaining) and “statements that go toward” (initiate, build, maintain relationship; offers info about discussion; creates engagement). See chart for a further breakdown of these elements. (Click on chart to expand and get a closer look).

These frames are fascinating, and potentially useful in other contexts. It will be interesting to give this framework to students who can then use it to conduct their own content analysis studies.

Finally, it was notable that the study authors chose to examine hate speech vis-à-vis an imbalance of power between speakers and target, asking, “Does the group being targeted have a means to defend itself?” The response to this question is vitally important, since it speaks to the practical impact of hateful messages.