Where digital hate finds its home: perpetrators’ preferred affordances and their experiences with content moderation and user intervention

Digital hate poses a significant challenge to democratic principles. However, not much is known about who produces it regularly, let alone across platforms. Drawing from routine activity theory as an overarching framework, our study investigated how the perceived importance of social media affordances is related to regular digital hate perpetrators’ platform use. Further, it explored how this usage is linked to experiences of moderation and interventions against them. Findings of quota-based surveys in four European countries (i.e., Austria, France, Hungary, and Sweden) suggest that perpetrators’ perceived importance of persistence and anonymity is consistently related to social media use across platforms, from which, in turn, primarily Telegram, Reddit, Twitch, and TikTok were linked to more frequent moderation and intervention experiences. By and large, our findings contribute to the current fight against digital hate by highlighting the need for regulatory strategies that account for perpetrators’ perceptions of affordances across platforms.