Limiting the capacity for hate: Hate speech, hate groups and the philosophy of hate

On May 8, 2020, Antonio Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General warned on Twitter ‘the pandemic continues to unleash a tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering’ ‘appealing for an all-out effort to end hate speech globally’ and urging governments to ‘act now to strengthen the immunity of our societies against the virus of hate.’¹ He called on political leaders to show solidarity with all members of their society and to build and reinforce social cohesion. He also called on educational institutions to focus on digital literacy at a time when billions of young people are online when ‘extremist are seeking to prey on captive and potentially desperate audiences.’ Also he called on social media companies top to remove racist and other offensive material in line with international human rights law. He referred to the launch of The United Nations Strategy & Plan of Action on Hate Speech (2019) noting ‘a disturbing groundswell of xenophobia, racism and intolerance’, the growth of neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements and the weaponization of public discourse to stigmatize and dehumanize the other.² As the Foreword indicates:

This is not an isolated phenomenon or the loud voices of a few people on the fringe of society. Hate is moving into the mainstream – in liberal democracies and authoritarian systems alike. And with each broken norm, the pillars of our common humanity are weakened.³

Other civil rights groups have warned about the rise of racist and xenophobic discrimination and violence linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, with an alarming increase in the number of racial attacks against Asian and especially Chinese people.⁴ The Strategy and Plan of Action (United Nations, 2019) designed to ‘enhance global resilience’ defines ‘hate speech’ as:

any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor.

The report calls on governments to prohibit hate speech and observe international law that prohibits the incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence because incitement as a form of speech ‘explicitly and deliberately aims at triggering discrimination, hostility and violence, which may also lead to or include terrorism or atrocity crimes.’

The Strategy elaborates a set of principles:

1. The strategy and its implementation to be in line with the right to freedom of opinion and expression. The UN supports more speech, not less, as the key means to address hate speech;

2. Tackling hate speech is the responsibility of all – governments, societies, the private sector, starting with individual women and men. All are responsible, all must act;

3. In the digital age, the UN should support a new generation of digital citizens, empowered to recognize, reject and stand up to hate speech;

4. We need to know more to act effectively – this calls for coordinated data collection and research, including on the root causes, drivers and conditions conducive to hate speech.⁵

The strategy also emphasizes ‘using education as a tool for addressing and countering hate speech’ and the opportunity to ‘implement SDG4, promote the values and skills of Global Citizenship Education, and enhance Media and Information Literacy.’ There is a clear mandate for State education to address the issue of hate speech in order to prepare students to understand, analyse and resist the call of hate groups but also to equip students to exercise informed judgment about the nature of conspiracy theories circulated by social media platforms like Facebook.

There has been a huge proliferation of ‘hate groups’ and ‘hate speech’ online recently with a spike during the pandemic. Sarah Manavis (2020) reports ‘Covid-19 has caused a major spike in anti-Chinese and anti-Semitic hate speech’ indicating ‘Exclusive data given to the New Statesman shows that the pandemic has led to an extraordinary increase in hate speech, racism and incitements of violence online.’ Manavis (2020) refers to the analysis of more than 600 million tweets by Moonshot,⁶ a technology company that monitors online extremism. Of some 200,000 forms of hate speech and conspiracy theories the majority were anti-Chinese with hashtags such as #CCPVirus,#ChinaLiedPeopleDied and #DeepstateVirus revealing a 300% increase.

The concept of collective hate has led to the notion of hate crimes which refers to a crime motivated by prejudice and discrimination that stirs up a group of like-minded people to target victims because of their membership of a social group, religion or race. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), founded in 1971 by civil rights lawyers to monitor and ensure the promise of the civil rights movement, advocates for equal justice and equal opportunity.⁷ The organization examines the number of hate groups on Twitter and presents an annual census demonstrating that the number of ‘likes’ and comments on hate group accounts grew by 900 percent in the last two years. In 2019 SPLC tracked 940 hate groups across the US.⁸

Other agencies have also monitored the growth of hate groups often associated with the rise of the far-right. The Human Rights Watch observes:

Several political parties and groups, including in the United States, United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Greece, France, and Germany have also latched onto the Covid-19 crisis to advance anti-immigrant, white supremacist, ultra-nationalist, anti-semitic, and xenophobic conspiracy theories that demonize refugees, foreigners, prominent individuals, and political leaders.

Human Rights Watch also has examined the human rights dimensions of the COVID-19 response in terms of the public health threat and actions to restrict freedoms in its name including access to information, travel bans, protective custody, the right to education in the pandemic, patient confidentiality, and the protection of health workers and other front line staff.⁹

Zachary Laub (2019) in a background report for The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) entitled ‘Hate Speech on Social Media: Global Comparisons’ indicates that ‘Violence attributed to online hate speech has increased worldwide’ and provides examples of the rise of hate-mongering. He examines how social media offer a platform for hate groups and indicates that Facebook and other media platforms make their money by ‘targeting audiences with extreme precision’.¹⁰ Roger McNamee who was an early investor in Facebook and is now an advisor to the Stop Hate for Profit campaign is reported as saying:

If you think about a system where you’re trying to get engagement, the best way to do that is to scare people or to make them outraged. And what does that? Hate speech, disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Susanne Smalley (2020) quotes McNamee as saying ‘Hate speech, disinformation and conspiracy theories’ are the ‘lubricant’ to the Facebook’s business model. It also ‘gives small numbers of really extreme people a disproportionate voice in our politics’, she quotes McNamee as saying.¹¹ There have been several reports recently that speak of Facebook as being ‘ripe for manipulation and viral misinformation’¹² (e.g., Tucker, 2020). Carole Cadwalladr (2020) the journalist who broke the story on Cambridge Analytica argues that Facebook and America are now indivisible ‘and the world is a sicker place for it’.¹³

In her introduction to Oxford Bibliographies on ‘Hate Crime’ Lynn Addington (2014) indicates the term is recent one but, coined in the 1980s ‘to identify crimes motivated by bias against the victim’s actual or perceived membership in a status group such as a particular race or religion’. She provides a useful introduction to general overviews of the topic. Brown (2017: 419) in addressing the question ‘What is hate speech?’ suggests that while the topic has received much attention there have been few attempts at analysing the concept ‘hate speech’ itself. Brown’s major contribution is to view the concept in terms of a family resemblance given that it is ‘a heterogeneous collection of expressive phenomena’ rather than regarding ‘emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred are part of the essential nature of hate speech’. Yet reconciling free speech with protection against hate speech is not intuitively obvious for liberal states where all non-coercive speech should be protected including the free speech of racists. On the basis of a perfectionist argument Shaun O’Dwyer (2020) argues that rather than criminalizing hate speech ‘the state passes laws exhorting citizens to stand up to hate speech’.¹⁴ Defining hate speech and regulating it through legislation is a very recent and difficult exercise. One example is Kōrero Whakamauāhara: Hate Speech An overview of the current legal framework¹⁵published by the NZ Human Rights Commission (2019) with the aim of providing an introduction to hate speech in international law in order to clarify the issues surrounding the regulation of free speech. The critical issue is where to draw the line between the protection of freedom of expression on the one hand and the incitement to hatred on the other (p. 8) which becomes more complicated with the rise of online hate speech that can seriously target and affect minors. As the report makes clear:

Under international law, speech is generally regulated by three treaties: the ICCPR, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination 1965 (ICERD), and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 1948 (Genocide Convention) (p. 12).

NZ is in the process of proposing new hate speech laws likely to be introduced before the coming election on September 19.

What emerges from much of this research is that the subject has been under-researched and that social psychologists and philosophers embrace different and contradictory positions. As Agneta Fischer et al. (2018) argue:

Hate has been considered an emotional attitude (Ekman, 1992), a syndrome (Solomon, 1977), a form of generalized anger (Bernier & Dozier, 2002; Frijda, 1986; Power & Dalgleish, 1997), a generalized evaluation (Ben-Ze’ev, 2000), a normative judgment (McDevitt & Levin, 1993), a motive to devalue others (Rempel & Burris, 2005), or simply an emotion (Elster, 1999).

Fischer et al. (2018) in ‘Why We Hate’ offer a functional perspective based on appraisals and actions. As they argue in their abstract:

Hate is based on perceptions of a stable, negative disposition of persons or groups. We hate persons and groups more because of who they are, than because of what they do. Hate has the goal to eliminate its target. Hate is especially significant at the intergroup level, where it turns already devalued groups into victims of hate. When shared among group members, hate can spread fast in conflict zones where people are exposed to hate-based violence, which further feeds their hate. Hate can be reassuring and self-protective, because its message is simple and helps confirming people’s belief in a just world https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1754073917751229

While hate is regarded as a negative phenomenon complexly related to an ecology of feelings including ‘anger, contempt, disgust, humiliation, revenge feelings’ and a disposition toward hostility and aggression toward groups regarded as inferior or evil some scholars do not consider hate an emotion. ‘Why We Hate’ (2018) is also a six-part document produced by Stephen Spielberg who is interested in why we hate and how we can overcome it.¹⁶

While social psychologists have investigated prejudice, stereotyping, discrimination and intergroup aggression studies of hatred seem remarkably rare. Various approaches have been adopted including a social influence model driven by situational variables, the interpersonal attitude approach corelated with authoritarian attitudes and social dominance, and the model of social cognition (Harrington, 2004).

In the philosophy of hate the results are uneven. In ‘From Plato to Putnam: Four ways to think about hate’ Royzman et al. (2005) make the following comment:

The classic formulations of hate, those by Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, and Darwin, are notable for their contradictions. For Descartes (1694/1989), hate was an awareness of an object as something bad and an urge to withdraw from it. For Spinoza 0677/1985), it was a case of pain (sadness) accompanied by a perception of some external cause. For Aristotle (trans. 1954), the distinguishing phenomenological fact about hate was that it is pain-free (in addition to being incurable by time and striving for the annihilation of its object). Hume (1739–1740/1980) argued that neither love nor hate can be defined at all, because both are irreducible feelings with the introspective immediacy of sensory impressions. Darwin (1872/1998) also saw hate as a special feeling, one that lacks a distinct facial sign and manifests itself as rage (p. 4).

They remark how in modern conceptions hate is treated in terms of a syndrome and sometimes as an ‘emotional attitude’ and they review Soloman’s (1977) work that sees hatred as an emotion that

treats the other on an equal footing neither degrading him as 'subhuman' (as in contempt) nor treating him with the lack of respect due to a moral inferior (as in indignation) nor humbling oneself before (or away from) him with the self-righteous impotence of resentment" (p. 324, cited in Royzman et al., 2005).

Szanto (2020) focuses on the peculiar affective intentionality of hatred which he suggests is distinctive in that it has an ‘indeterminate affective focus’ from which ‘haters derive the indeed extreme affective powers of the attitude … from the commitment to the attitude itself’ and ‘in sharing this commitment to hate with others, hatred involves a certain negative social dialectics, robustly reinforces itself and becomes entrenched as a shared habitus’ (p. 453).

Hate is best define and theorized in terms of the philosophy of emotions where is has been elaborated within a larger theory of emotions as feelings, as judgements, as evaluative perceptions, feeling or patterns of salience, as evolved affect programs, in terms of behavioural ecology, psychological constructivism and forms of enactivism (Scarantino & de Sousa, 2018).

By contrast in relatively simple terms I propose a social theory of hate that recognizes hate speech as a form of political psychology associated with the formation of neo-Nazi and far-right attitudes and often coordinate collective hate actions phenomena, deliberately cultivated and encouraged through political associations and political groups on the basis of revenge, hate and violence. It is a classic reformation and reinvention of American neofascism, different from Italian and German Fascism, strongly associated with white supremacist ideology and forms of national populism. Insofar as that might be true it is also worth considering the techniques of rhetoric, persuasion, manipulation, indoctrination exercise through social media such as Facebook. A special mention must be made of conspiracy and conspiracy theories especially as deliberate perpetration of a mass psychology of terrorism and violence against the other. An understanding of the coordination of social media and use of mobile technologies as the technological means of sustaining hate groups and hate activities is central to any such analysis. Such a theory is hopeful in the sense that political attitudes can be exposed, examined, reflected upon, and schooled or resocialised. They also can be regulated by law at both national and international levels. Obama’s promise of ‘hope’ was a discourse that emphasized many interrelated liberal virtues in relation to race such as tolerance, peace, respect, security and ultimately love. The US never approached ‘post-racial’ America as Obama claimed but now we need a better understanding of Donald Trump’s rhetoric of hate and the ways it teaches us indifference, minimisation, veiled racism, discrimination and violence (and ultimately genocine).

Michael A. Peters
Beijing Normal University, Beijing, P.R. China
[email protected]

Notes

1 https://twitter.com/antonioguterres/status/1258613180030431233?s = 20

2 https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Plan%20of%20Action%20on%20Hate%20Speech%2018%20June%20SYNOPSIS.pdf

3 https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Plan%20of%20Action%20on%20Hate%20Speech%2018%20June%20SYNOPSIS.pdf

4 https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide

5 https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Plan%20of%20Action%20on%20Hate%20Speech%2018%20June%20SYNOPSIS.pdf

6 http://moonshotcve.com/vision/

7 https://www.splcenter.org/about

8 https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map

9 https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/19/human-rights-dimensions-covid-19-response

10 https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hate-speech-social-media-global-comparisons

11 https://news.yahoo.com/facebook-thrives-off-of-hate-speech-disinformation-and-conspiracy-theories-says-early-investor-roger-mc-namee-202638591.html

12 Yaël Eisenstat: 'Facebook is ripe for manipulation and viral misinformation', https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/26/yael-eisenstat-facebook-is-ripe-for-manipulation-and-viral-misinformation

13 ‘If you’re not terrified about Facebook, you haven’t been paying attention’, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/26/with-facebook-we-are-already-through-the-looking-glass

14 https://www.magzter.com/article/Lifestyle/Philosophy-Now/Perfectionism-Hate-Speech-Law

15 https://www.hrc.co.nz/files/2915/7653/6167/Korero_Whakamauahara-_Hate_Speech_FINAL_13.12.2019.pdf

16 https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/steven-spielberg-alex-gibney-why-we-hate-discovery-1202745676/