Hate Campaigns Research Articles

Legacies and recipe of constructing successful righteous motherhood policies: The case of Hungary

This study will show how the Hungarian ruling FIDESZ government has built its so-called family-friendly system, which has both nationalized and privatized the process of reproduction together. First, we discuss the demographic discourse and family mainstreaming as the basis of “righteous motherhood” producing more children together with hate campaigns, second, we argue that one of the reasons why most women voted for FIDESZ despite the collapsing health care system, the education system, growing inflation, corruption, and Putin's friendship is exactly the convincingly crafted cult of righteous motherhood. While some of the literature still uses Nazi Germany as a historical analogy to explain the FIDESZ government's family policy as forcing women back into the kitchen, with this it loses the ability to recognize what is new in the illiberal politics with its built-in conscious application of ambiguities of righteous motherhood, we call Janus-faced, secures electoral support to these regimes.

Disinformation and weaponized communication: The spread of ideological hate about the Macedonian name in Greece

The study examined through ideological discourse analysis (IDA) 38 widely spread disinformation-laced news stories (or “fake news”) regarding the Macedonian Name Dispute (MND) and the “Prespes Agreement” in the years 2018 and 2019. The paper explores the ideological narratives and constructions disseminated through the disinformation-laced news stories during these 2 years. Therefore, the study expands the relevant literature regarding democracy, disinformation, and hate campaigns by examining the ideological narratives and constructions disseminated through the disinformation-laced news stories during that two-years-period. The findings showed that those news stories were successfully weaponized and resulted in empowering identity characteristics and ideological narratives through the distancing method (us vs them), the alienation with elements of dramatization (e.g. territorial loss of the Greek Macedonia due to the “Prespes Agreement”), and the sense of victimization and dehumanization that demanded emergency actions to protect the ingroup (Greece) from the outgroup (North Macedonia and its Greek assistants).

Gendered Islamophobia in Italy: The Case of Silvia Aisha Romano

This paper aims to investigate gendered Islamophobia in Italy through a significant case study: the hate campaign that affected Silvia Aisha Romano, a 24-year-old aid worker kidnapped in Kenya by a group linked to Shabab, who chose to convert to Islam. On May 10, 2020, after 18 months of detention, Silvia landed in Rome wearing a light green jilbab. The initial joy for her release was followed by very violent Islamophobic and misogynist insults, by both right-wing and left-wing politicians, newspapers, and opinion leaders, including some feminists. This paper will carry out a discourse analysis on this debate, focusing on some pivotal aspects: the roots of contemporary gender Islamophobia in colonial Orientalism and epistemic Eurocentrism; the contemporary debate on Muslims and Islam in Italy, and the media’s role in reproducing stereotypes and discrimination; the political convergence between very different actors in the systematic attack against Italian Muslim women.

The long trail of Palestinian antisemitism

ABSTRACT Contrary to the commonly held misconception, Palestinian antisemitism is not a corollary of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict but the other way around: the perpetuation of the conflict is a direct result of the deeply ingrained Palestinian-Arab Jew-hatred and the attendant rejection of any form of Jewish statehood. From the onset of the conflict, a century ago to this day, Palestinian Arabs have been subjected to a sustained hate campaign of racial, religious and political incitement that has portrayed Jews (and Israelis) as the source of all evil, synonyms for iniquity, corruption and decadence, whose clear and present danger to human kind can only be removed through their complete annihilation. Small wonder that not a single Palestinian-Arab leader has ever recognised the millenarian Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel or evinced a true liking for the ‘two-state solution’ since it was first evoked in 1937.

People or Ideology? Social Conservatism and Intergroup Contact Moderate Heterosexuals’ Responses to a State-sponsored Anti-LGBT Campaign

IntroductionRecent years have witnessed the global rise of illiberal regimes, which built widespread support by initiating hate campaigns against minorities. This research examined a government-led anti-LGBT campaign in Poland and its impact upon attitudes of the wider public.MethodsOur study (N = 2061 heterosexual participants) assessed sexual prejudice (blatant dehumanization and modern homonegativity) and pro- and anti-minority action intentions in two representative surveys, conducted before (fall 2018; N = 821) and after (summer 2019; N = 1240) the beginning of the anti-LGBT campaign.ResultsPrejudice and anti-minority action tendencies increased during the analyzed period. However, there was also an increase in pro-minority action tendencies, demonstrating public resistance. These effects were moderated by respondents’ levels of social conservatism and their prior contact with LGBT people. Low (compared to high) levels of social conservatism reduced (or even reversed) the impact of the state-sponsored anti-LGBT campaign on sexual prejudice, which further translated into pro- and anti-minority collective action intentions. High (compared to low) levels of contact predicted a reduced effect of the campaign on blatant dehumanization, which translated into lower anti-minority action tendencies. Blatant dehumanization and modern homonegativity differentially predicted participants’ willingness to engage in pro- and anti-minority collective action, highlighting the importance of taking a more granular approach when predicting action intentions.Policy ImplicationsWe discuss implications for interventions aimed at protecting vulnerable groups in the face of anti-minority rhetoric.

Bots Amplify and Redirect Hate Speech in Online Discourse About Racism During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Online talk about racism has been salient throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet while such social media conversations reflect existing tensions in the offline world, the same discourse has also become a target for information operations aiming to heighten social divisions. This article examines Twitter discussions of racism in the first and sixth months since COVID-19 was accorded pandemic status by the World Health Organization and uncovers dynamic associations with bot activity and hate speech. Humans initially constituted the most hateful accounts in online conversations about racism in March, but in August, bots dominated hate speech. Over time, greater bot activity likewise amplified levels of hate speech a week later. Moreover, while discourse about racism in March primarily featured an organic focus on racial identities like Asian and Chinese, we further observed a bot-dominated focus in August toward political identities like president, Democrat, and Republican. Although hate speech targeting Asian groups remained present among racism discussions in August, these findings suggest a bot-fueled redirection from focusing on racial groups at the onset of the pandemic to targeting politics closer to the 2020 US elections. This work enhances understanding of the complexity of racism discussions during the pandemic, its vulnerability to manipulation through information operations, and the large-scale quantitative study of inorganic hate campaigns in online social networks.

A Multimodal Deep Framework for Derogatory Social Media Post Identification of a Recognized Person

In today’s era of digitization, social media platforms play a significant role in networking and influencing the perception of the general population. Social network sites have recently been used to carry out harmful attacks against individuals, including political and theological figures, intellectuals, sports and movie stars, and other prominent dignitaries, which may or may not be intentional. However, the exchange of such information across the general population inevitably contributes to social-economic, socio-political turmoil, and even physical violence in society. By classifying the derogatory content of a social media post, this research work helps to eradicate and discourage the upsetting propagation of such hate campaigns. Social networking posts today often include the picture of Memes along with textual remarks and comments, which throw new challenges and opportunities to the research community while identifying the attacks. This article proposes a multimodal deep learning framework by utilizing ensembles of computer vision and natural language processing techniques to train an encapsulated transformer network for handling the classification problem. The proposed framework utilizes the fine-tuned state-of-the-art deep learning-based models (e.g., BERT, Electra) for multilingual text analysis along with face recognition and the optical character recognition model for Meme picture comprehension. For the study, a new Facebook meme-post dataset is created with recorded baseline results. The subject of the created dataset and context of the work is more geared toward multilingual Indian society. The findings demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in the identification of social media meme posts featuring derogatory content about a famous/recognized individual.

Moral compass: How a small-town newspaper used silence in a hyper-charged controversy

A recent controversy over plans to build a mosque in the provincial Australian city of Bendigo provides an interesting case to explore the news practices of one small-town newspaper faced with an issue that triggered an avalanche of hate speech, bigotry and extremist voices. Between 2014 and 2016, there was open conflict inside the city’s municipal chamber, violent street protests, hate campaigns and disinformation on social media. This research considers the role of the Bendigo Weekly in facilitating and shaping debate among local news audiences. Our research reveals that the newspaper deployed silence as a deliberate strategy for countering hatred and to tourniquet debate to the local level. The newspaper argued this was in the interests of serving as a ‘moral compass’. The importance of engaging a diversity of voices in deliberative democracy is widely celebrated in journalism studies. This essay, however, extends scholarship on silence as a form of agency for countering hate speech that is becoming an increasing feature of the digital era.

GOVERNANCE OF THE FACEBOOK PRIVACY CRISIS

In November 2018, The New York Times ran a front-page story describing how Facebook concealed knowledge and disclosure of Russian-linked activity and exploitation resulting in Kremlin led disruption of the 2016 and 2018 U.S. elections, through the use of global hate campaigns and propaganda warfare. By mid-December 2018, it became clear that the Russian efforts leading up to the 2016 U.S. elections were much more extensive than previously thought. Two studies conducted for the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), by: (1) Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika; and (2) New Knowledge, provide considerable new information and analysis about the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) influence operations targeting American citizens.By early 2019 it became apparent that a number of influential and successful high growth social media platforms had been used by nation states for propaganda purposes. Over two years earlier, Russia was called out by the U.S. intelligence community for their meddling with the 2016 American presidential elections. The extent to which prominent social media platforms have been used, either willingly or without their knowledge, by foreign powers continues to be investigated as this Article goes to press. Reporting by The New York Times suggests that it wasn’t until the Facebook board meeting held September 6, 2017 that board audit committee chairman, Erskin Bowles, became aware of Facebook’s internal awareness of the extent to which Russian operatives had utilized the Facebook and Instagram platforms for influence campaigns in the United States. As this Article goes to press, the degree to which the allure of advertising revenues blinded Facebook to their complicit role in offering the highest bidder access to Facebook users is not yet fully known. This Article can not be a complete chapter in the corporate governance challenge of managing, monitoring, and oversight of individual privacy issues and content integrity on prominent social media platforms. The full extent of Facebook’s experience is just now becoming known, with new revelations yet to come. All interested parties: Facebook users; shareholders; the board of directors at Facebook; government regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); and Congress must now figure out what has transpired and what to do about it. These and other revelations have resulted in a crisis for Facebook. American democracy has been and continues to be under attack. This article contributes to the literature by providing background and an account of what is known to date and posits recommendations for corrective action.

Activism, Advertising, and Far-Right Media: The Case of Sleeping Giants

This study examines the international activist movement known as Sleeping Giants, a social-media “campaign to make bigotry and sexism less profitable” (Sleeping Giants, n.d.). The campaign originated in the US with an anonymous Twitter account that enlisted followers in encouraging brands to pull their online advertising from <em>Breitbart News</em>. The campaign achieved dramatic success and rapidly spread to regions outside the US, with other anonymously run and loosely allied chapters emerging in 15 different nations (as well as a regional chapter for the EU). Many of these were initially created to take on <em>Breitbart</em> advertisers in their home countries, but in a number of cases they subsequently turned their attention to disrupting financial support for other far-right news media in—or impacting—their home countries. Based on interviews with leaders of eight Sleeping Giants chapters, as well as the related UK-based Stop Funding Hate campaign, this study examines the Sleeping Giants campaign with respect to its continuity with media activism of previous eras, while also seeking to understand its potential as one of the first high-profile activist campaigns to grapple with the impacts of programmatic advertising on the news ecosystem. In particular, we consider how the campaign’s interventions speak to the larger debate around the normative relationship between advertising and the performance of the news ecosystem.

Governance of the Facebook Privacy Crisis

In November 2018, The New York Times ran a front-page story describing how Facebook covered up knowledge and disclosure of Russian-linked activity and exploitation resulting in Kremlin led disruption of the 2016 and 2018 U.S. elections, through the use of global hate campaigns and propaganda warfare. By mid-December 2018, it becomes clear that the Russian efforts leading up to the 2016 U.S. elections were much more extensive than previously thought. Two studies conducted for the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), by: (1) Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika; and (2) New Knowledge, provide considerable new information and analysis about the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) influence operations targeting American citizens. By early 2019 it has become apparent that a number of influential and successful high growth social media platforms have been used by nation states for propaganda purposes. Over two years earlier, Russia was called out by the U.S. intelligence community for their meddling with the 2016 American presidential elections. The extent to which prominent social media platforms has been used either willingly or without their knowledge by foreign powers continue to be investigated as this Article goes to press. Reporting by The New York Times suggests that it wasn’t until the Facebook board meeting held September 6, 2017 that board audit committee Chair Erskin Bowles became aware of Facebook’s internal awareness of the extent to which Russian operatives had utilized the Facebook and Instagram platforms for influence campaigns in the United States. The degree to which the allure of advertising revenues blinded Facebook to their complicit role in offering access to Facebook users to the highest bidder is not known at this time. This Article will not be a complete chapter in the corporate governance challenge of managing, monitoring, and oversight of individual privacy issues and content integrity on prominent social media platforms. The full extent of Facebook’s experience is just now becoming known, with new revelations yet to come. All interested parties: Facebook users; shareholders; the board of directors at Facebook; government regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); and Congress, must now figure out what has transpired and what to do about it. Senator Warren’s presidential campaign has also placed billboards visible to the commuter trains traveling from San Francisco to the heart of Silicon Valley reading, “Break Up Big Tech.” Hers is just one voice in a growing chorus of political leaders reacting to privacy demands from constituents framed as an antitrust remedy. These and other revelations have resulted in a crisis for Facebook, the leading global social media platform. American democracy has been and continues to be under attack. This article contributes to the literature by providing background and an account of what is known to date and posits recommendations for corrective action.

Responding to Hate in Contemporary Japan: Fragmenting Factors Obstructing Effective Ethnic Advocacy

Zainichi Koreans, whose ancestral migration resulted from Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula (1910–1945), are a culturally assimilated minority group now showing accelerated structural assimilation through naturalization and intermarriage with the Japanese majority. Nonetheless, since the mid-2000s, internet-mobilized right-wing activists have deployed hate campaigns against Zainichi Koreans or institutions they label as ‘anti-Japanese’. Conventional Zainichi Korean organizations, the pro-Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) Chongryon and the pro-Republic of Korea (ROK) Mindan, have never formally collaborated to respond. Drawing on fieldwork (2011–2016) and secondary sources, this article explores factors that maintain fragmented ethnic advocacy. Focusing on Zainichi organizational responses to three hate incidents in Kyoto and Tokyo, I examine four dimensions: (a) preceding inter-organizational relationship, (b) bureaucratic inertia, (c) discordant framing strategies, and (d) external socio-political conditions. Organizational stances differ not just by pledged allegiance to different Korean nation-states, but also by organizational response to Japanese policy-making and the legislature. While both organizations adopt framing strategies based on the universal norm of human rights, Chongryon emphasizes minority education rights and Mindan problematizes hate speech per se. I argue that the contrasting strategies reflect broader socio-political factors more than organizational characteristics. Heavy reliance on the Japanese majority as the target audience maintains a fragmented Zainichi Korean advocacy.

IMPOLITENESS STRATEGY IN INSTAGRAM CYBERBULLYING: A CASE STUDY OF JENNIFER DUNN POSTED BY @LAMBE_TURAH

Social media is used by most Indonesian people. Social media brings good and bad influence. One of the bad influences is cyberbullying. Cyberbullying that is found in Instagram is the most different from other social media. Instagram has become the source of hate campaign by the occurrence of gossip account. @Lambe_turah is one of the biggest gossip accounts in Indonesia. The posts in @Lambe_turah have triggered its followers to perform cyberbullying to the person in their post. The victim of cyberbullying who became the focus of this research was Jennifer Dunn. The aim of this study was to investigate the comments which contain cyberbullying by using impoliteness strategy proposed by Culpeper (2005). This study uses qualitative approach. It is shown by the data collection method which was done by examining documents. The analysis of this study was done by interpreting the collected data. The result showed that negative impoliteness was the most common impoliteness strategy to be used in cyberbullying. The second impoliteness strategy that was used in cyberbullying was bald on record. From both of these strategies, it could be concluded that cyberbullying tend to attack the addressee directly by using various types of statements.

FROM CONVENIENT HIBERNATION TO CIRCUMSTANTIAL DESPERATION: HATE SPEECH, PARTY POLITICAL COMMUNICATION AND THE NIGERIA’S 2015 GENERAL ELECTIONS

Até alguns meses para as eleições gerais de 2015, muitos partidos políticos que hibernaram convenientemente por uma boa parte da sua existência, talvez devido à falta de estrutura organizacional adequada ou base de apoio, programas descoordenados ou por terem sido registrados por ganhos pecuniários, de repente começaram a aparecer no espaço político. O principal partido da oposição e o partido no poder estavam ou aperfeiçoando processos de fusão ou envolvidos em discussões internas, de modo que a comunicação com o eleitorado em questões fundamentais tornou-se inconsequente. Na verdade, os dois partidos dominantes, o Partido Popular Democrata e o Congresso Progressista Geral apenas lançaram seus candidatos presidenciais menos de cinco meses para as eleições; e a campanha eleitoral assumiu a contestação desesperada em um clima de preconceito e intolerância. Os discursos de ódio e a violência foram as características de suas campanhas eleitorais. As eleições gerais de 2015, portanto, oferecem um contexto único para interrogar o lugar da comunicação política do partido em uma democracia emergente e, especificamente, como as campanhas de ódio entre os gladiadores políticos/partidos conflitantes poderiam gerar violência e, se não domesticadas, descarrilar a consolidação democrática. Este artigo afirma que o discurso de ódio não é apenas inspirado por algumas circunstâncias sociais, mas também parte de um processo democrático geral. Isso atesta o fato de que os políticos nigerianos se tornaram mais desesperados e ousados em tomar e manter o poder político; e mais intolerantes à oposição, críticas e esforços para substituí-los. Baseando-se amplamente em fontes secundárias com a ajuda de ferramentas descritivas e narrativas, este ensaio conclui que a cultura política de um país determina o comportamento e a atitude da população em relação ao sistema político, e que a transição democrática de uma administração para outra, particularmente em democracias emergentes, muitas vezes foi acompanhada de violência promovida pelos desejos do partido político no poder para consolidar seus apelos ao poder e pelo interesse dos interessados em capturar o mesmo.

#INeedDiverseGames: How the Queer Backlash to GamerGate Enables Nonbinary Coalition

Abstract GamerGate, the online hate campaign that violently threatened and harassed prominent feminists in gaming, claimed that feminists were destroying gaming culture through their alleged influence on game journalists and industry professionals. We position GamerGate as an incendiary reaction to the changing (no longer overwhelmingly white, cisgender, heterosexual and male specifically) demographic of game players. We argue that GamerGate supporters operated under a false binary of identity: either one is a true gamer (male, masculine), or one is a feminist woman trying to be a gamer. Yet myriad intersectional identities continue to queer game space, and we propose that the hate campaign #GamerGate is an acknowledgement of and reaction to this queering of game spaces, not just feminist criticism. Tweets using anti-GamerGate hashtags, such as #INeedDiverseGames evidence the many identities that came together in solidarity, resisting GamerGate harassment. To examine the resistive solidarity of anti-GamerGate backlash, we draw upon feminist, queer, social movement, social media, and gaming literatures to cultivate a theory of nonbinary coalition, and argue that this is a tool for agents of change in gaming culture.

Nihongata haigaishugi: Zaitokukai, gaikokujin sansēken, higashi ajia chisēgaku(The Japanese-Model of Xenophobic Exclusionism: Zaitokukai, Resident Foreigner Enfranchisement and East Asian Geopolitics)

In 2013, heito supīchi (hate speech) was ranked in the top 10 places in the ryūkōgo taishō (the Japanese popular expression grand prix), one of the year-end mass-media rituals that captures the year’s noteworthy social phenomena. Hate speech became one of 2013’s buzzwords because of the intensity of confrontations between Zaitokukai street demonstrators [Zainichi tokken o yurusanai nihon shimin no kai (Japanese citizens’ group against the privileges of special permanent residents)] and its sympathizers and anti-hate counter demonstrators. Although media coverage of hate speech increased dramatically in 2013, the Zaitokukai has been active since the mid-2000s. Zaitokukai members and sympathizers adopt intentionally provocative, derogatory, and politically incorrect expressions in their campaign efforts in both cyberspace and on the streets. Their prime hate speech target is zainichi Koreans—resident Koreans with special permanent residency who are former Japanese nationals of colonial origin or their descendants. Zaitokukai protests can also be against anything members consider pro-Korean, which they reflexively brand anti-Japanese. They target zainichi Korean organizations, schools, nursing homes, business areas, and neighborhoods with a concentration of zainichi Koreans and have directed their hate campaigns at Japanese municipal governments, corporations, and the Japanese Teacher’s Union as well. Zaitokukai’s ‘conservatism in action’ and protests by sympathetic far right groups have resulted in arrests as well as criminal and civil law suits, but they never appear to deter them from campaigning.

Notes on Church-State Affairs

A new law came into effect on March 5, 2012, in New South Wales requiring veiled women to uncover their face for identification purposes when giving statutory declarations and affidavits. New South Wales has the highest concentration of Muslims in Australia. Voters in Gföhl in Lower Austria denied Buddhists permission to build what would have been the largest Buddhist temple in Europe, with 67 percent of voters opposed to the temple. Bop Jon Sunim, the Buddhist monk who initiated the project, blamed the vote on a hate campaign. A group called the Austrian Society for the Protection of Tradition, Family and Private Property distributed pamphlets opposing the temple that included the phrase, “Buddhism in Austria, a wolf in the sheepfold.” The State Committee for Work with Religious Organizations began proceedings to close Greater Grace Church in Baku for failing to achieve compulsory re-registration. Members of the church say they are being denied their constitutional right to freedom of religion. This is the first case of its kind since the introduction of compulsory re-registration under the strict 2009 Religion Law.

Transnational Bio/Necropolitics: Hindutva and its Avatars (Australia/India)

In the US diasporic context, Kamat and Matthews (2003) have traced how Hindu nationalists draw on multiculturalist discourse for their presence while simultaneously funding cultural and political projects in India that incite hate and conduct violence against Muslim and Christian communities. In the Australian context, Hindu nationalist organisations have legitimised and consolidate themselves through the rhetoric of liberal multiculturalism. Such strategies which draw on state rhetoric of multiculturalism while simultaneously engaging in hate campaigns against Muslim and Christian others demonstrates Hindutva's ability to operate through a transnational necropolitics. This paper explores how a state biopolitics of multiculturalism enables the violence of Hindutva's necropolitics in the transnational routes between Australia and India.

Hate campaign forces nursing union to move

Hate campaign forces nursing union to move

The Hate Campaign of March 1968: How Did It Become Anti-Jewish?

The Hate Campaign of March 1968: <i>How Did It Become Anti-Jewish?</i>