Editors' Introduction

The definition of hate speech online and the laws curtailing such forms of speech are in a constant flux due to the supranational character of the internet, the slippery nature of online harassment, and the porous relationship between actual violence and discriminatory speech. Besides the hateful messages propagated across social networking platforms and micro-blogging sites, the recent rise of live-streamed hate has also captured public attention forcing governments and internet providers to contend with the issue of how to prevent and punish such online activity. As many of the contributors highlight throughout this volume, the term ‘hate’ itself is extremely difficult to define, stemming as it does from the extremes of socio-psychopathic impulses, an inability to regulate emotion adequately, or merely from a lack of empathy. In some cases, the denigrators do not even hate their victims, they are merely pliable individuals who feel the need to emulate the sentiments of a strong cohort of denigrators in order to gain ‘insider’ status. Such individuals, however, are no less to blame than the hate mongers themselves, since they actively contribute to an echo chamber which serves to amplify and reinforce the hatred deployed. Whether they truly detest their targets or merely emulate the apparently dominant group, the aim of haters, be they online or offline, is to relegate the victims to a generic category of ‘others’, and in hate speech the other is always the enemy. The concept of ‘Othering’ is linked to a number of analogous dichotomous segregational categorizations such as inclusion/exclusion, superiority/inferiority and dominance/subordination. The differences between the ‘us’ belonging to the dominant grouping, and the ‘them’ banished to the out-group are magnified in hate speech: the insiders are safe, legitimate, normal and rational, the outsiders are dangerous, different, threatening and antagonistic. As Lister states: othering is a “process of differentiation and demarcation, by which the line is drawn between “us” and “them” – between the more and the less powerful – and through which social distance is established and maintained” (2004: 101). Although the focus of this volume concerns, in the main, the digital environment, the editors and contributors are all well aware that hate speech online does not occur in a virtual vacuum, its effects are dramatically real for those individuals who are on the receiving end. Cyberbullying and hate speech impinge upon the lives of individuals from social, economic, professional and psychological standpoints (see, amongst others, Van Dijk 1987; Delgado 1982; Graumann 1998; Tsesis 2002; Klein 2010; Herz & Molnar 2012; Sindoni 2017, 2018; Fruttaldo 2020), and increase the sense of fear and vulnerability of entire communities.