Reported User-Generated Online Hate Speech

Iztok Šori (Peace Institute) and Vasja Vehovar (Faculty of Social Sciences) published an article in the journal Social Sciences in which they analyze hate speech reported by Internet users to the Spletno oko monitoring organization. They especially focus on hate speech towards migrants, who have been the most attacked group in recent years. As they note, the main discursive feature of reported hate speech is the solution (prognosis), which usually includes the threat of extreme violence or death. Another key feature is the references to various forms of weapons and Nazi crimes from World War II, indicating the authors’ far-right ideological beliefs. A third feature is the metaphors, employed to provoke disgust from migrants, present them as culturally inferior and raise fears about their supposed violent behavior. The corresponding diagnoses are musch less present and frame migrants as a threat in a similar way to populist political discourses of othering and complement these in providing ‘final’ solutions in prognoses.