My vox-pol fellowship in 2015–2016 coincided with two
important developments in Europe. The first was the eruption
of social media hate speech that followed hundreds of thousands
of refugees arriving from war-ravaged Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The second was the growing buoyancy of the extreme right online,
who tried to capitalise on this anger to increase its political power
and recruit followers.
I had just finished a research project in Ethiopia, a country
with a long history of civil war and conflict. It was a sobering experience
to return to Europe to discover how the social media debates
on the refugee crisis had become more aggressive and vitriolic
than anything I had experienced before as a comparative digital
media researcher. A cursory look, for instance, at Facebook pages
in Finland (a country that is more commonly known for its peaceful
politics, consensus, and social stability) would reveal thousands
of comments using the most graphic and violent language possible,
such as “Those rats should be exterminated from the world,” and
“Why don’t we shoot the invaders into a hole and burn them with
gasoline to warm our feet?”
All the hallmarks of ostensibly the worst kind of ‘hate speech’
were present: attacking people based on their group identity; dehumanising
them by comparing them to animals; and incitement to
violence. Moreover, such comments were posted by individuals using
their public profiles, visible for anybody to see.