The Role Of Hate Speech In Social Media

1. Introduction

The internet supports a global ecosystem of social interaction. Modern life revolves around the network, with its status updates, news feeds, comment chains, political advocacy, omnipresent reviews, rankings and ratings. For its first few decades, this connected world was idealized as an unfettered civic forum: a space where disparate views, ideas and conversations could constructively converge. Ring (2013) stated that the Internet is changing the face of our communication and culture. It has drastically altered the way we get our news and information, talk to our friends through social media platforms, find places, make a payment, register for institution, apply for job, and generally live our lives. Internet certainly has

Firstly, Ring (2013) wrote about a thesis entitled “Hate Speech in Social Media: an Exploration of the Problem and Its Proposed solutions”. This study research shows that although most major social media companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter have their own policies regarding whether and what kinds of hate speech that are permitted on their sites, the policies are often inconsistently applied and can be difficult for users to understand. In Ring’s dissertation, she suggested that social media platforms have to encourage self-regulation about what kind of hate speech contents are, and those contents are not permitted on these sites. Forming A working group comprised of social media decision makers will develop the policy and staff members of the Federal Communications Commission will facilitate this process. The focus of her study is the legal communication and scholars of those social media regulations. Ring (2013) gave an example about hate speech that glorified violence against women after an organized social media campaign by Nissan’s advertising on Facebook. The role of consumers and advertisers are important in guiding social media companies’ decision regarding content removal. Thus, it seems social pressure from consumers and advertisers may be a powerful tool for minimizing the amount of hate speech on social media Web sites. This study supports the fact about how a hate speech may spread in any kind of

(2010). The study shows the ever-increasing amount of information flowing through social media forces the members of these networks to compete for attention and influence by relying on other people to spread their message. A large study of information propagation within Twitter reveals that the majority of users act as passive information consumers and do not forward the content to the network. In this study, Romero, et al. (2010) stated about the explosive growth of social media has provided millions of people the opportunity to create and share content on a scale barely imaginable a few years ago. Massive participation in these social media platforms is reflected in the countless number of opinions, news and product reviews that are constantly posted and discussed in social sites such as Facebook, Digg and Twitter. Given this widespread generation and consumption of content, it is natural to target one’s messages to highly connected people who will propagate them further in the social network. They use an application of the IP algorithm to find ranking users by their relative influence. This study shows that the correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. They claimed that information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it