Hate Speeches on Twitter and Facebook in South Asia: A Case Study Of Malala Yousufzai

Abstract

Nowadays social media platforms have become a medium that allows people to post anything they wish. Since the time internet grew, a radical change has been discerned in society. With the emergence of social media sites, many challenges also thrived in the society that took the society into interesting and alarming ways altogether. As time is passing as technology is intensifying new forms of hate, abuse, bullying, and discrimination are also increasing in society. It can be said that digital technology is reshaping coercion based on caste, color, gender, race, culture, likes, dislikes. Many societies are concerned with this problem of growing hate speeches on social media but no proper barrier on these sites has been seen to prevent hate discourses. This study examined the attitudes of social media users including Facebook and Twitter over the incident of Noble Prize laureate Malala Yousufzai, a young activist who worked and spoke for the educational rights of girls who were born in Swat valley. She spoke against this erroneous system that didn’t allow girls to gain education and became a prominent member of society at the little age of 14. She was shot by Taliban and then a controversy started against her, some people admired her and she became a celebrity all over South Asia while an extreme amount of criticism was also seen against her incident. Through this study, we aim to understand the abundance of hate speech on Facebook and Twitter in South Asia by using Qualitative and Quantitative Research Methods. For that purpose we took the case study method and provide a large-scale measurement and analysis of different hashtags used during the case of Malala on the social media platform. To achieve the objective of our research, we amassed Tweets and Facebook posts posted since the year 2011 till now related to this case. This article identifies numerous forms of hate speeches on social media that are arising in South Asia and altering the minds of people using social media, it is also guiding how to abate hate speeches that are delivered on social media with particular hashtags on various incidents and matters. The collected data revealed that hate speech has become a social problem with substantial inimical effects in societies. This study explains that social media should be utilized to benefit mankind positively and gently.