The growth of the internet has led to a rise in hate speech that has the power to impact thousands of people with just one click, says Joe Walther, a Distinguished Professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Communication Department.

“It’s an important social issue and it’s a paradoxical mess that people don’t understand,” Walther said in a recent interview. 

Quantifying how many people are exposed to hate on line and how many are targeted or victimized by hate online, is difficult to ascertain, Walther said, but it’s significant. He recently reviewed 15 studies on the topic and found that anywhere from 16% to 79% of people around the world have been exposed to hate in online spaces — racism, religious bigotry, sexism and anti-immigrant denigration among other hateful ideologies. Results vary based on region and how the survey questions were framed, but they clearly show that it’s important to study why people engage in these acts and what reward they get from doing it. 

So, Walther created a course dedicated to this phenomenon, titled Perspectives on Online Hate Speech, which delves into the hate that is being shared and transformed through technology. 

The class follows an innovative structure with only one in-person group meeting every week that lasts two hours. Walther goes over concepts such as cognitive dissonance theory and the great replacement theory, and then students present to their peers on the assigned weekly readings, teaching the class. The material focuses on how technology speeds the spread of hate speech through networked harassment groups or actions such as trolling. 

Walther’s research into online hate speech stretches back to the 1990s when he started studying emotional expression in computer-mediated communication. Most recently he’s been named as a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, where he conducted research on online hate messaging. 

Walther recently spoke about his new course, Online Hate Speech, which is offered for the second time this spring. 

Q: What inspired you to create this course? 

A: The issue [online hate speech] sits at the nexus of free speech guarantees, and tech companies’ willful encouragement of hate, because outrage promotes users’ engagement — even if angrily. What’s left is to try to learn why people do it, what rewards they get from doing it. I personally think it’s best understood as a communication process — not just a personality characteristic but something that ebbs and flows due to influences of social media users on one another. It’s contemporary, relevant to students’ lived experiences. It raises theoretical issues, new forms of research and it’s on the leading edge of research in communication, sociology, data science, political science and other approaches.

What did you factor in when it came to the design of this course? 

I wanted the course to examine online hate from a variety of informative perspectives. We start by comparing definitions. We examine why people hate others, generally, as scapegoats or out of fear. We learn how online hate is often the result of organized, collective processes, not individual actions, and even how hate posters reward each other through ‘likes’ and affirmational replies. We look at how social media platforms are regulated, and how they regulate hate speech, to learn why there are no simple legislative fixes. Finally, we look at the effects of online hate on people’s psychological well-being and its potential links to real-world violence.

We don’t pass judgement on what people say in hate messages — emotions and judgments can get in our way of level-headed examinations and comparisons. We avoid politics, which isn’t easy. And we look at offensive language that normally is quite off limits in the classroom. For instance, we want to learn what happens when someone replies to a racist message by objecting to it: do hate posters back off and use milder language, or do they double-down with more extreme slurs and racial degradation? Academic research on the question is inconclusive, so we’re looking at online conversations, ourselves, on various platforms — to come to our own conclusions.

What do you hope students will take away from this course beyond the specific content?

One of the biggest points that I've been able to make in my research that I would like to also convey in the class is that I think it's important to look at online hate as a social process and as a communication activity. What that means to me is that it's not a ‘one-message-and-done’ thing. … We’re working our way to understanding things as a process. And I think that's the most important thing to take away.

When you do that, the students right now, their knee jerk reaction is: What, or who, should we hold responsible? What should policies do? Should there be laws to control this? Should influencers face more scrutiny than other people? These are impossible recommendations. The students don't realize that. You can't just wave a magic wand and solve these problems. To someday be able to change the dynamics, we really have to understand the underlying processes and ramifications that are going on. I hope that by the end of the course we get there. 

Erica Gaspar is a third-year Communication major pursuing the Professional Writing Minor. She wrote this piece for her Digital Journalism course.