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Páginas: 222-233 Recibido: 2022-01-13 Revisado: 2022-01-19 Aceptado: 2022-03-11 Preprint: 2022-03-15 Publicación
Final: 2022-05-31 |
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Hate speech: a systematic review of
scientific production and educational considerations
Discursos de odio: revisión sistemática de la producción
científica y consideraciones educativas
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Alberto Izquierdo Montero |
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Noemi Laforgue-Bullido |
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David Abril-Hervás |
Abstract
Hate speech is a specific form of expression targeting certain vulnerable
or minority groups. It is a social phenomenon which has gained strength in
recent years due to its normalisation from the public
sphere and escalation on social media, particularly in contexts of crisis such
as the circumstances that have arisen around COVID-19. This paper presents a
systematic review of the scientific literature
produced over the past two decades in English, Portuguese and Spanish as a tool
to examine, from social science, the landscape of studies around one of the
main threats democratic societies face today. In addition to an evidence-based
idea of the state of the art, the results show a substantial increase of
research into hate speech over the past five years and how focal points and
disciplines have evolved from those approaches and are gaining in importance,
along with the analysis of regulations and laws, computational linguistics and discourse analysis. Furthermore, the dearth
of research from the field of communication and education is confirmed, which
would allow us to examine not only its management and analyse
its impact, but rather its understanding from critical pedagogical perspectives
committed to the deepening and extension of democracy.
Resumen
Los discursos de odio constituyen una forma de
expresión específica dirigida contra determinados colectivos vulnerabilizados. Se trata de un fenómeno social que ha
ganado fuerza en los últimos años de la mano de su normalización desde la
esfera pública y su propagación a través de las redes sociales, especialmente
en contextos de crisis como la generada en torno a la COVID-19. En este trabajo
se presenta una revisión sistemática de la literatura científica producida en
las dos últimas décadas en inglés, portugués y español, como herramienta para
acercarnos desde las ciencias sociales al panorama de estudios acerca de una de
las principales amenazas a las que se enfrentan hoy en día las sociedades
democráticas. Además de disponer de un estado de la cuestión basado en
evidencias, los resultados muestran un incremento sustancial de la
investigación sobre discursos de odio en los últimos cinco años, así como una
evolución de los enfoques y disciplinas desde los que se aborda, en los que
cada vez tienen más peso, junto al análisis de normas y leyes, la lingüística
computacional y el análisis del discurso. Se constata, además, una escasez de
investigaciones que desde el campo de la comunicación y la educación permitan
abordar no solo su gestión y el análisis de su impacto, sino su comprensión
desde perspectivas pedagógicas críticas comprometidas con la profundización y
extensión democrácticas.
Keywords / Palabras
clave
Scientific activities; Speech; Emotions;
Discrimination; Disinformation; Media education; Pedagogy; Democracy.
Actividad científica; Discurso; Emociones; Discriminación;
Desinformación; Educación sobre medios de comunicación; Pedagogía; Democracia.
1. Introduction
Hate speech is an ever-present social phenomenon in our societies,
particularly since its normalisation in the public
sphere (Fernández de Castro & González-Páramo,
2019) and the rise of so-called “authoritarian populism” (Norris &
Inglehart, 2019). This speech poses a threat to social harmony and has prompted
different national and international institutions to create expert opinions and
recommendations. One of these institutions is the European Commission Against
Racism and Intolerance (2016), which has warned of hate speech’s reach,
defining it as the use of one or more specific forms of expression, or its
justification and backing, to promote the rejection of specific social groups
which have, contextually, become more vulnerable — namely, women, and ethnic or
religious minorities and migrants — in a non-exhaustive list of categories.
Fish (2019) has suggested the patent link between hate speech and “action”, in
as much as they involve performative messages of reality and, therefore, cause
suffering to certain collectives, despite a lack of recognition in
legislation.
By and large, hate speech includes a repertoire of communication
strategies able to fuel the creation of predatory (Appadurai, 2007) and
murderous (Maloouf, 1999) identities in a present day
characterised by a “neoliberal time which threatens
to be an anti-democratic time” (Fassin, 2018, p.
128). This discursive strategy looks to connect with certain collective
emotions that arise from successive economic and social crises (Foessa Foundation, 2019), stoking fear and a dismissal of
those not considered worthy of sharing the increasingly scarce aid and
guarantees of the “welfare state”. Such discourse deliberately appeals to that
“deep history” we recount so as to shape our image and self- and group esteem
(Hochschild, 2016), and which is linked, in turn, “not so much to a sense of
inequality that must be repaired but a sense of privilege that must be
conserved opposite those who wish to attack it” (Rancière,
2021, p. 1). Situations of mounting uncertainty such as the COVID-19 pandemic
intensify this trend (United Nations, 2020).
Within this context, a global rise in the presence of different anti-rights
movements can be observed and documented, a kind of “Reactionary International”
(Ramos et al., 2021) or “International of Hate” (Tamayo, 2021), which, on a
European stage, focus their efforts on attacking the rights of women, migrants
and LGBTIQ+ collectives (Cabezas & Medina, 2021). This entails a framework
of social agents, mostly connected to the extreme right (political parties,
media, think tanks, web spaces, influencers, swathes of trolls and bots sitting
in virtual private communities, etc.), which look to impose a narrative
framework — and with it a political, economic and social agenda – capable of normalising that which today we understand to be
“politically incorrect” (Stefanoni, 2021) through a tautening of the right to
the “freedom of expression” and the progressive displacement of the Overton
Window[1]
(Marantz, 2021). Thus, there is the search for an antidialogical
situation (Tiburi, 2019) through the expansion of a
specific framework to define the “common sense” of our times (Lakoff, 2007).
The worrying rise of hate speech in recent years (United Nations, 2019)
is bound to and exacerbated by what some experts on post-truth and fake news
have defined as “a state of widespread lies” (Aparici
& García-Marín, 2019, p. 24). Such a backdrop raises a set of questions
which are worth heeding: initially, we wondered whether, as a result, there
will have been growing interest in this area from the scientific-academic
field, as we will see in the systematic review laid out here. We maintain that
to examine this hypothetically exponential increase in studies that address
such a subject could stress the importance of observing how research on hate
speech has been made up until now, to then continue working along lines which
can complement each other and can be effectively translated into the wholesale
understanding and weakening of such mechanisms of production and dissemination,
and the social effects (Emcke, 2017).
Another reason which leads us to engage in a systematic review of scientific
literature on hate speech is the hitherto limited presence of this kind of
approach around the phenomenon we are concerned with. As we will see, among the
systemised documents only two systematic reviews in
this respect have been identified prior to that presented here. The first one
exclusively centres on
racist and xenophobic speech on social media (Bustos Martínez et al., 2019),
gathering documents in Spanish and English across a seven-year time frame with
the aim of offering information on online hate speech. Therefore, it includes
articles, reports and documents from institutions which devote their time to
reporting and eradicating xenophobic discrimination. The second (Paz et al.,
2020) focuses on the compilation and analysis of legal studies and the field of
communication. These analyse 1,112 scientific
articles written in English and Spanish between 1975 and 2020, tracing the Web
of Science (WoS) through different descriptors
related to hate speech recommended by the Council of Europe in the handbook
drawn up by Keen and Georgescu (2020). The findings show that research on hate
speech is nothing new, although it was notuntil 2003
that it grew significantly.
The present systematic review looks to complement and broaden the
evidence provided by the aforementioned, while also
looking at publications in three languages — English (Eng.), Portuguese (Por.)
and Spanish (Spa.) — with a greater number of available articles in this
subject area and expanding the focal point to scientific-academic articles
which are not necessarily indexed in the WoS. As far
as we are concerned, we also add the category Approach to the proposed
classification to match the type of approach from the Disciplines studied.
Consequently, the main objective of the present work is to conduct a systematic
review of the scientific-academic approach of hate speech over the last twenty
years (2001–2020), taking as a chronological reference the start of policies
framed inside the “War on Terror” in the wake of the 9/11 attacks as one of the
main landmarks articulating current narratives (Velasco & Rodríguez-Alarcón, 2020). Accordingly, another three specific
objectives have been pursued: 1) to identify those scientific publications
which tackle the issue of hate speech from a specific criteria of
inclusion-exclusion; 2) to draw up a categorisation
proposal that can be used to classify the said studies and can prove useful in
identifying the state of this issue and as the basis/guidance for future
research around it; 3) provide knowledge about the temporary evolution of
studies resolving around hate speech, indicating some of the shortcomings
identified within this sphere, as well as possible lines of continuity, with a
strong emphasis on the area of educommunication, i.e.
focusing on a media and information literary praxis as a question of democracy
(Carlsson, 2019).
2. Methodology
The work we present in this article encompasses many of the main
methodologies formulated by Grant & Booth (2009) in their “SALSA framework”
to carry out systematic reviews of scientific literature, which for the sphere
of social sciences this author defines as “systemised
reviews”, differing from other empirical studies in the field of experimental
sciences. Consequently, the procedure has been developed from a constant
self-questioning around the suitability of each phase comprising it: search,
selection, analysis and synthesis (Ibid.) has entailed
a reflective exercise, set out below, from transparency, whilst also being an
essential component of the systematic review (Codina,
2018), making it — and us — available for other researchers.
2.1. Search
procedure and inclusion-exclusion criteria
We started the search process by making a comparison between the
institutional search tools of Universidad Nacional de Educación
a Distancia (UNED) and Universitat
de les Illes Balears (UIB),
universities with which we are associated as a research team. We opted for
UNED’s Linceo+ search tool as it yielded a higher
number of results when we carried out the search: 360 vs 246[2].
The characteristics of such a search are specified in the following criteria:
1) search terms and languages: “hate speech” (Eng.), “discurso
de odio” (Spa.), “discurso
de ódio” (Por.), in singular and plural, present in
the title. In a previous search with no language filters, we noted that
English, Portuguese and Spanish, in that order, were
by far the predominant languages among the references generated; 2) the
material type: “all records” and “peer-reviewed publications; 3) time frame:
2001 to 2020 (twenty complete years).
In applying the advanced search, and also considering its conciseness
(which, for instance, determined us being limited to the three higher-profile
languages), it generated 360 publications, to which we applied the following
exclusion criteria by means of a thorough review of scientific articles: a
language that differs from those selected; the impossibility of accessing the
complete text; book review; book chapter; repeated appearance (eliminating
copies); no approach to the topic of hate speech, despite it being included in
the title.
The application of this exclusion criteria reduced n=360 to n=266[3]
as a final number of scientific articles making up the systematic review we analysed in the present work, and which is presented in
Figure 1 with respect to two of the initial inclusion coordinates (date and
language) present in the meta-data of the selected articles:
Figure 1. Scientific articles
according to date and language of publication
2.2. Proposal
for the classification fo scientific articles
The proposal of classification (Table 1) was generated through a repeated
circular inter-rater process of agreement – individual review and group
discussion around the adequacy of subcategories. The initial categories stem
from screening questions to respond to the scientific approach taken in this
subject area in the last twenty years, placing emphasis on: 1) the support upon
which studied hate speech is manifested; 2) the focus of this hate speech; that
is, the collectives at which it is aimed; 3) the scientific approach or
methodology used to analyse the information and draw
conclusions; and 4) the discipline or disciplines from which this subject is
addressed. Furthermore, these four categories were divided into 33
subcategories to classify the different articles. The subcategories emerged during
the reading and analysis of the different texts (Monge, 2015), which explains
how they do not fully reflect the possible array of subjects and aspects linked
to hate speech, since they were limited to those observed through the analysis
of systematized scientific articles. Despite these being assembled so not to
overlap — they are mutually exclusive – the same article can be categorised into subcategories from the same family and,
for instance, can reference two different focal points of hate speech.
Table 1
Categories and subcategories to classify
studies on hate speech and its frequency in this study
|
Category name |
Subcategories |
Frequency (n) |
|
Category 1. Support |
Legal Framework Social Media Literature Speech by Public and/or influential Figures Perception of the Population Websites Media Education Centres Others |
80 67 44 22 19 18 16 8 5 |
|
Category 2. Focus |
Undefined Migrants and Ethnic Minority Groups Racism with a Religious Element Gender, Identifications and Sexual Orientations Political Antagonism |
165 63 31 28 12 |
|
Category 3. Approach |
Normative Analysis Discourse Analysis Document Review Detection, Algorithms and Machine Learning Case study Questionnnaire Others Ethnography Systematic Review |
89 53 45 33 20 13 9 9 2 |
|
Category 4. Discipline(s) |
Law Social Sciences and Politics Computational linguistics Philosophy Communication Psycology Semiotics Education Sciences Interdisciplinary Approach Others |
106 77 30 12 11 10 7 5 4 4 |
The first classification category proposed is the Support,
understood as the place — physical or symbolic — where hate speech is
positioned, analysed, and addressed in the articles
that are part of the systematic review. This category is also made up of various
subcategories: Education Centres, for speech
which occurs in education institutions; Speech by Public or Influential
figures, for speech expressed by people with a far-reaching voice, as, for
instance, in the abundant literature on hate speech in US election campaigns;
Literature, for messages starting from articles, scientific theories or
entertainment literature; Legal Framework, for the analysis of laws,
legal cases or sentences; Media, for speech that occurs in mass media
(TV, Newspaper, Radio…); Perception of the Population to talk about hate
speech, or the opinion of it, by the population in general terms; Social
Media, for those messages located on online social media accounts — Twitter,
Facebook, Instagram, Reddit… — Websites, for hate speech expressed on
websites or comments in the news and on videos; and Others, for those
spaces that cannot be classified in the aforementioned categories and which
have a lingering presence.
The second category is the Focus; namely, the collective or
collectives at which hate speech is aimed. Among the different subcategories
are: Political Antagonism to name hate speech that attacks people or
collectives with minority political ideals — more in terms of power than
number; Gender, Identifications and Sexual Orientations, to group
together misogynous LGBT-phobic speech; Migrants and Ethnic Minority Groups
for messages discriminating against people positioned on the less privileged
side of these categories; Racism with a Religious Element in reference
to speech which discriminates against people on the basis of creed, and with a
direct link to racism (Islamophobia, anti-Semitism…); and Undefined, for
those articles which do not clearly state the hate speech they are referencing.
Although these subcategories have surfaced from the review, we are also aware
that they do not encompass the full range of existing hate speech or that their
classification could be different.
As a third category, we set up the Approach; that is, the scientific
method used to approach this reality: Analysis of Speech; Normative
Analysis; Questionnaire; Detection, Algorithms and Machine
Learning; Case Study; Ethnography; Documentary Review;
Systematic Review; and Others.
Finally, the articles have been categorised
based on the Discipline(s) from which they address the subject of study.
The disciplines which make up these subcategories are: Social Sciences and
Politics; Education Sciences; Communication; Law; Philosophy;
and Interdisciplinary Approach for those studies which tackle hate
speech from more than one theoretical discipline; Computational Linguistics;
Psychology; Semiotics; and Others.
3. Analysis and results
As already noted, scientific output about hate speech has increased
exponentially in recent years, with the paperspublished
in the last five years representing 62.36% of the total sample, coinciding with
that highlighted in other reviews (Paz et al., 2020), which point to an
exponential growth of research around the issue from 2014 onwards. In the
present section, we will carry out an in-depth analysis of how the study of
hate speech is characterised based on the Support,
Focus, Approach and Discipline.
3.1.
Disciplines that address hate speech
After carrying out 266 subcodifications, a
broad representation of subjects related to Law (39.85% of the total)
has been encountered in a detailed analysis of the disciplines approaching hate
speech (Figure 2). This involves studies which analyse
this problem from the perspective of the legal sphere and an analysis of
sentences, comparative law, and legal trends. Other disciplines with a high
representation in this area are: Social Sciences and Politics (28.95%)
and Computational Linguistics (11.28%), and, less frequently, we find Philosophy
(4.51%), Communication (4.14%), Psychology (3.76%) and Semiotics
(2.63%). The studies on hate speech approached from Education Sciences
(1.88%), Interdisciplinarity (1.50%) and Other Disciplines that
differ from those previously mentioned (1.50%) are more incidental.
Figure 2. Disciplines addressing
research on hate speech
If we focus on the temporary development of research into hate speech, Computational
Linguistics appears as a discipline that emerges over the past five years
with a representativeness of 18.07% — this category involves studies focused on
creating algorithms that detect and act opposite hate speech via Machine
Learning; a recent systematic review focusing on this issue was carried out
by Poletto et al. (2021). We also found that
Psychology had a higher representation in the first five years but was
gradually generating fewer publications regarding hate speech — moving from
representing 20% to 1.81% of the total in the first and last five-year period,
respectively.
3.2. The methodological approach to deal
with hate speech
The articles which
address hate speech do so from divergent methodological focal points (Figure 3).
A total of 273 codifications have been carried out in this regard, with the
possibility of various methodological approaches being applied in the same
article. The most frequent analysis methodology is Normative Analysis,
carried out in 32.60% of cases. By and large, the studies approached are from
the discipline of Law. Other methodologies frequently used are Discourse
Analysis (19.41%), Document Review — articles with a more
theoretical tenor — (16.48%), and Detection of Algorithms through Artificial
Intelligence and Machine Learning (12.09%). To a lesser degree, there
were also uses of Case Studies (7.33%), the Questionnaire
(4.76%), Ethnography (3.30%) and Other Approaches (3.30%). Only
0.73% of articles address this subject from the Systematic Review.
Figure 3. Approaches hate speech
works are addressed from
The most frequently used approaches in Law are Normative Analysis (75,85%),
Document Review (12,03%) and Case Study (3,70%). This entails
studies which address legislation regarding hate speech in different
territories, specific court cases or schools of thought around the dichotomy of
freedom of expression/the penalisation of hate
speech. The approach of Detection, Algorithms and Machine Learning is
addressed in full from Computational Linguistics (96,66%).
For the most part, they are articles which seek to respond to the strong
presence of hate speech on the internet and, above all, on social media.
Discourse Analysis is the approach which most in Communication (54,54%)
and Social and Political Sciences (44,15%) opt for, analysing
speech that materialises on social media, in
different theoretical strands and in the speech expressed by public and
influential figures. Ethnography is another of the focal points used by Social
Sciences and Politics (7,79%), while from Psychology the
Questionnaire (80%) is chosen as a technique to approach this subject area,
chiefly impacting the population’s perception of hate speech.
3.3. The Focus of hate speech
In relation to the Focus of hate speech (Figure 4) upon which these
studies centre, 299 codifications have been carried out, with most studies
concentrating on different collectives affected by this speech. The most
frequent subcategory was Undefined (55.18%). To a large degree, these
are studies which do not define the focus on which the analysis is centred and
speak generically in that respect — in some cases they can cause confusion
between hate speech and other types of disrespectful or antagonistic expression
related to a collective or specific minority. The second most concurred
subcategory is Migrants and Racialised Minority Groups (21.07%), and
within this subcategory we find studies which reference anti-immigration speech
and racist discourse aimed at ethnic minorities, for example gypsy people. Thirdly,
we find Racism with a Religious Element (10.37%), a subcategory which
includes those which refer to Islamophobic and anti-Semitic hate speech, or
those referring to other minority religions in the territory in which hate
speech occurs. To a lesser extent there exists speech that makes a reference to
discrimination due to Gender, Identifications and Sexual Orientations
(9.36%) or hate speech on account of Political Antagonism targeting
minority political groups in power terms (4.01%).
Figure 4. Focuses
approached from works on hate speech
Despite this general
data, other conclusions can also be drawn if we turn our attention towards the
different proposed time frames. First, it is worth noting that the number of
articles that do not define the types of hate speech referred to have increased
exponentially, rising from 36.84% to 65.52% of the total representation in the
last five years. Moreover, representation in studies encompassing Gender,
Identifications and Sexual Orientations as the focus of hate speech has
dropped, descending from 23.68% of the total in the first five years to 5.75%
in the last five. On another note, the percentage of studies which address this
subject area from the focus of Migrants and Minority Racialised
Groups rose by almost 13 percentage points in the 2011–2015 period.
3.4. The Support of hate speech
Within this category (Figure 5), 279 classifications have been made —
28.67% of the total is research focused on the legal treatment of hate speech,
followed by the analysis of this speech present on Social
Media (24.01%), hate speech addressed in or from Literature
(15.77%) and hate speech expressed by Public or Influential Figures
(7.89%), particularly in the framework of election campaigns. The other categories
have a lower presence.
The articles which address this issue from the Legal Framework
focus their gaze on national laws or international recommendations, comparative
studies between countries, case studies/sentences, security protocols or
studies on the development of laws of this nature. Regarding to the Social
Networks more commonly named in these articles, we find Facebook (19.40%)
and even more so Twitter (44.77%), the latter of which is demonstrably the social
media platform, which is more prone to hate speech, correlating to the
reductionism of language associated with the limited number of characters in
each tweet, among other aspects. The analyses focused on Literature reference,
in the main, academic production — articles, theoretical trends, etc. —
although to a lesser degree we find articles that focus on historical
literature or literary-style texts. Those studies which address hate speech
expressed by Public or Influential Figures refer to academic
authorities, religious leaders and social media
influencers.
Nevertheless, if we observe the trend from a longitudinal gaze, we can
see how the chief support was the Legal Framework in the first three
lustrums — from 2001 to 2015 — followed by Literature or Speech by
Public or Influential Figures, a trend which changes in the last five
years, bringing about an exponential growth of interest in the study of Social
Media as hate speech supports, along with the mutual growth of studies
which address the Legal Framework.
Figure 5. Supports where the
hate speech analysed in publications is found
4. Discussion
Through this study we have sought to contribute to widening knowledge
around the scientific-academic work being carried out to understand hate speech,
particulary in terms of a “socially alive issue” (Izquierdo Grau, 2019) which is relevant for education and
democratic functioning. The results of this systematic review demonstrate a
notable increase in the scientific-academic interest in hate speech, specially
over the last five years, and they also coincide with that observed by Paz et
al. (2020), who cite 2014 as the year when publications around this issue
really took off. In recent years, in which the use of the concept of “hate
speech” has also spread to other spheres (the media, NGDOs, observatories,
social movements…). It also coincides with the emergence of
nationalist and xenophobic political parties in numerous European parliaments
or even in governments, within what could be understood as the “fourth wave” in
the rise of the extreme right (Acha, 2021). These
parties and organisations have exploited attacks on
European soil and the humanitarian plight of refugees, particularly in the
second half of the last decade and, from a position of power and privilege,
they take on hate speech as a daily political tool (Mouffe,
2018). In fact, the public policies deployed by Bolsonaro in Brazil could explain
the position of Portuguese as the second highest language represented among the
publications found in this systemisation of articles;
since sixteen of the 22 articles in this language (72.7%) were published
between 2017 and 2020, and from a concern focused chiefly on regulatory
frameworks and on democratic guarantees to regulate the hate speech that stems
from power.
This democratic unrest, addressed primarily from a Law perspective, has
its strongest presence in the scientific publications analysed,
in which there is a deepened tension between the “freedom of expression” and
the dignity and protection of vulnerable collectives (Bleich, 2014; Fish,
2019). Tension in which we encounter different stances that could be reconciled,
perhaps, via midway concepts such as the “responsibility of expression” as a
proposal to rethink the limits of individual freedom in democratic contexts
(Todorov, 2014), particularly when this is at odds with human dignity. This
legal concern has crossed over in recent years with what has been happening in
virtual environments and on social media, which emerge as the main stages
through wherehate speech flows on account of a series
of circumstances that nurture it (Jakubowicz, 2017;
Cohen, 2018; Carlson, 2021; Marantz, 2021). In part, this responds to types of
messages dovetailing with the tendency of the media and social media to dramatise information by prioritising
sensationalist, simplified and controversial issues (Ellinas, 2010).
In this regard, in the past five years the Detection of Algorithms and
Machine Learning emerges as a way to answer this
discursive explosion on online social media (Oriola
and Kotze, 2020), and, consequently, it comes as no surprise that Computational
Linguistics is one discipline with a greater standing in studies on hate
speech, in reference to the most recent years and behind Law and Social
and Political Sciences. This observation raises the question of whether the
same algorithmization that has been useful for managing
hate speech as an in-demand commodity through fake news and other content of
disinformation can also be a valid tool to combat it, especially when there is
a lack of articles and research to prevent hate speech, both in the sphere of
communication and informative deontology and in educommunication,
despite the recommendations oriented towards investigating and promoting media
and information literacy (Muratova et al.,
2019).
Regarding the Focus areas targeted by hate speech, we find that
the majority are not centred on a social-target group in particular, but instead uphold a rationale through
different examples or by reflecting on hate speech in general. This will not be
problematic if there is an awareness that hate speech can only be considered as
such if, among other requirements (Kaufman, 2015), it is aimed at real or
imagined collectives in a vulnerable position within a specific context; thus,
we can avoid conceptual corruption which could remove the predominantly
protective intent of such a concept (Waldron, 2012).
We have seen that both anti-immigration speech and speech aimed at racialised groups, with or without a religious element,
concur with reports and studies which place migrants under the spotlight of
anti-rights and hate speech (Fernández de Castro & González-Páramo, 2019). We are surprised that, despite anti-feminist
and LGTB-phobic speech also being at the heart of present-day hate speech, as
we saw previously (Cabezas and Medina, 2021), its study appears to have waned.
Hypothetically, this could be explained by the backing of other more specific
terms, instead of “hate speech”, from gender and LGBTIQ+ studies. Another
explanation for this phenomenon could be the more limited acknowledgment of
this type of communicative actions as hate speech. The recognition of sexist
and homophobic violence and the implementation of legal and social measures to
eradicate it are still embroiled in a process of development with a long road
ahead. It is unsurprising, then, that when we think of hate speech it is that
which is socially recognised and reported that comes
to mind, leaving to one side those struggles with less support. Therefore, we
can foresee that the broadening of speech recognised
as hate speech will be preceded by an increased space in the public agenda
taken up by these struggles. It is worth clarifying, equally, as we highlighted
in the methodology section, that the fact of having favoured
the emergence of subcategories from the selected articles has meant that
different existing focal points (ableism, aporophobia,
etc.) have not been reflected specifically in this systemisation,
a situation which does not imply a lack of social relevance.
Finally, the progressive update of the present systematic review and its
expansion into other languages, as well as search terms related to hate speech,
will be a necessary task to undertake on order to keep on increasing knowledge
of scientific approaches to this phenomenon.
5. Conclusions
As a conclusion, including lines of continuity, it would be interesting
to delve deeper into works that address hate speech from a practical
perspective via research and intervention proposals from educommunication.
Reviewing this type of project — still a minority, as the systemisation
has shown — could shed light on the strategies that are more useful for working
in different social settings, both in-person and virtual. The current algorithmization of the response to hate speech raises
doubts over whether its automated identification will cover the broad and
subtle repertoire of words, symbols, images, etc. used to socially damage
specific groups. Moreover, there must be an enquiry into the role algorithms
can play in democratic societies, and the limits of their use given that
visible speech is just the tip of the iceberg of a broader and more latent
series of problems, in which “the paradox entailed in the global rise of the
extreme right — and other actors of hate, we can add —[4]
and the danger of its ideology to democracy can only be stopped with more
democratic stances” (Acha, 2021, p. 134). Therefore,
investigations could delve into the relationships that can materialise
between algorithms and educommunication.
On the other hand, it would also be interesting to qualitatively explore systematised articles to discover the hate speech,
regarding that which we have referred to as Focus, considered by
researchers working in these areas and the reasons behind them prioritising some over others. Furthermore, we are
interested in observing how the US debate concerning the First Amendment, which
protects freedom of speech, influences arguments which academics from different
latitudes — not exclusively in a US context — use when it comes to justifying
(or not) the regulation of hate speech. This involves a debate in which, we
believe, societies as a whole should participate, and not just figures specialised in legal-judicial matters, nor exclusively from
logics situated in the Global North (de Sousa Santos, 2010), given that
“questions regarding the legal regulation of hate speech also raise concerns
about how the term will be defined and by whom” (Carlson, 2021, p. 13),
particularly taking into consideration that this type of speech “is a way to remind
members of other groups of your own group’s position of dominance” (Ibid.: p.
28–29). Without doubt, this opens the opportunity to carry out a “public
pedagogy” (Giorgy & Kiffer,
2020) to nurture the development of a profound pedagogical commitment to
addressing hate speech throught education (UNESCO,
2021), based on “learning to live together and learning together to live” (Garcés, 2020, p. 29) as the backbone of democracies.
Support
This systematic review is framed inside the
working context linked to the research project “Teenagers against hate speech. A participatory research to identify scenarios, agents and
strategies to face them” (INTER Research Group on Intercultural Education),
funded by the 2019 Research Grants of the “Reina Sofía” Center on Adolescence
and Youth.
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[1] The Overton Window
is a political theory which sets out a range (window) to place the imaginable,
normal, sensible, or acceptable for most people in a given
context, highlighting how this range can be displaced via communicative
strategies towards that regarded as politically incorrect, extremist or
unthinkable at a particular time, thereby normalising
discourse and practices which would not previously have been socially
acceptable
[2] At the time of
writing the article, available databases on the UNED search engine had risen to
121, and the said information can be consulted at the following link:
https://uned.libguides.com/az.php
[3] Link to Figshare, where the 266 corresponding bibliographical
references to scientific articles included in this systematic review can be
consulted: https://figshare.com/s/90751a81551440fcc465
[4] The em-dash clarification is ours.