No Hate Speech Movement: evolving genres and discourses in the European online campaign to fight discrimination and racism

Abstract

In March 2013, the Council of Europe (COE) launched the No Hate Speech Movement, a media youth campaign against hate speech in cyberspace. In this paper, we analyze a corpus collected from the COE’s website. The corpus includes web site pages designed by the COE’s campaigners, as well as materials such as self-made videos and photos posted on the blog by the general public. We focus on the No Hate Speech Movement landing page and the Hate Speech Watch page. Following the tradition of social semiotics, we propose to investigate the verbal and visual features across a range of different genres, in an attempt to verify whether the interaction of different modes involves any contamination in discursive practices, which could lead to the evolution of existing genres or to the birth of new text types. Moreover, we focus on the relationship between community and context in order to verify whether web-based communication alters the terms for determining genre. Finally, we try to understand the role of the audience by concentrating on the notion of participation.