Extreme Speech and Hate Speech

This course offers a critical introduction to hate speech and extreme speech, with a specific focus on the role of contemporary forms of digital communication. Hate speech and extreme speech have become a key concern for policy makers and state regulators, but it is important to examine its full scope as a global phenomenon with vast differences in context and political implications.  The key objective of this course is to take a global perspective on hate speech. The course tracks the definitions of hate speech, theoretical traditions that underpin them, and the limits of hate speech as a legal-regulatory discourse. Scanning various cognate frameworks such as dangerous speech, fear speech, hateful speech, and violent extremism that are used in understanding contemporary forms of aggressive and vitriolic speech, this course will introduce the ethnographically driven concept of “extreme speech”. We will study fake news, propaganda, Internet humor genres, rumor, racist speech, anti-minority speech, gender based violence, trolling, memes making, digital vigilantism, and xenophobic speech as different instances of extreme speech. At the same time, we will examine how extreme speech as subversive incivility has been instrumental in “talking against the authorities” in some cases. Finally, we will study different civil society, governmental and industry responses to hate speech. 

We cover different layers of digital mediation involved in shaping extreme speech, and different kinds of actors. These actors include i. dispersed yet ideologically active individual producers of exclusionary extreme speech, ii. semi-organized groups of volunteers and organized groups for right wing movements and ethnic/racial hatred, iii. minoritized groups targeted by extreme speech (refugees, immigrants, “liberals”, humanists, religious/ethnic groups), iv. politically “agnostic” paid trolls, v. business minded digital influencers, vi. precarious labor of the disinformation industry, as well as vi. civil society groups, individuals and community associations engaged in creative resistance to online extreme speech.

The course will draw upon the disciplinary traditions of media anthropology and communication studies. 

At the end of the course, students will

• demonstrate knowledge of prominent debates concerning hate speech;
  
• develop models to assess the role of digital communications in shaping hate speech and extreme speech;
  
• recognize the vast variation in the production and implications of hate speech by using different global case studies;
  
• develop skills to think about regulatory, civil society and political interventions in addressing hate speech.
  

 The course has no specific prerequisites.

Grading and participation

Students are encouraged to read the key texts assigned to each class, and prepare responses and questions to participate in classroom discussions. Final grading is based on the essay (3000 words for undergraduate students and 5000 words for masters students) that will discuss one empirical case of online hate speech/extreme speech, explicates the theoretical lens to study the case, and develops measures of regulatory and public intervention. Students will give a classroom presentation on the key arguments of the essay-in-making (theoretical and interventionist) in the final session.