Abstract
Departing from Jessie Daniels’s 2013 review of scholarship on race and racism online, this article maps and discusses recent developments in the study of racism and hate speech in the subfield of social media research. Systematically examining 104 articles, we address three research questions: Which geographical contexts, platforms, and methods do researchers engage with in studies of racism and hate speech on social media? To what extent does scholarship draw on critical race perspectives to interrogate how systemic racism is (re)produced on social media? What are the primary methodological and ethical challenges of the field? The article finds a lack of geographical and platform diversity, an absence of researchers’ reflexive dialogue with their object of study, and little engagement with critical race perspectives to unpack racism on social media. There is a need for more thorough interrogations of how user practices and platform politics co-shape contemporary racisms.
Highlights
Across the digital landscape, sociality is continuously transformed by the interplay of humans and technology (Noble 2018a)
Work on racism and social media has come a long way since Daniels’s article, which only briefly touched upon social media as novel spaces
While studies of social media and racism have certainly become more prominent, as Daniels forecasted, there is a dire need for a broader range of research, going beyond text-based analyses of overt and blatant racist speech, Twitter, and the United States and into the realm of wider geographical contexts, further platforms, multiplatform analyses, and thorough examinations of how racism on social media is ordinary, everyday, and often mediated through the visual
Summary
Sociality is continuously transformed by the interplay of humans and technology (Noble 2018a). In terms of the prevalence of critical race perspectives, we find that 23.08% of articles contain mentions and/or references to these lines of research (n = 24), while 76.92% do not (n = 80) This indicates that only a minority of scholars are relying on critical approaches to the study of racism and social media. Researchers in the field note how the ambivalence of social media communication and context collapse poses serious challenges to research, since racism and hate speech can wear multiple cloaks on social media including humor, irony, and play (Cisneros and Nakayama 2015; Farkas et al 2018; Gantt-Shafer 2017; Lamerichs et al 2018; Matamoros-Fernandez 2018; Page et al 2016; Petray and Collin 2017; Shepherd et al 2015) This invites researchers to look into new pervasive racist practices on social media, for example as part of meme culture. Reflections on ethical challenges of studying far-right groups largely remain absent in the literature, despite clear ethical challenges regarding risk of attacks on researchers, emotional distress and difficult questions of respecting the privacy of abusers versus protecting victims
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