Purpose
This study seeks to understand the opinions of internet users toward extreme speech on social media platforms and their willingness to censor such speech. The purpose of this paper is to examine how norms of freedom of expression are changing in an online communication environment dominated by these platforms.
Design/methodology/approach
Four focus groups were conducted in this study. Participants needed to use at least one social media platform daily. Groups were homogeneous in terms of race and gender: African-American females, African-American males, white females and white males.
Findings
Participants in general did not report a strong willingness to censor extreme speech on social media platforms. Rather, they expressed apathy and cynicism toward both their own and social media companies’ ability to combat extreme speech and make online discourse more positive. Female participants tended to value the overall health of public discourse and protection of more vulnerable social media users on social media platforms. African-American female participants called for platforms to recognize a special duty to protect minority users, whom they saw as responsible for the platforms’ success.
Research limitations/implications
Focus groups are useful for providing exploratory rather than generalizable data. However, by increasing the understanding of how individuals define extreme speech on social media, these data can reveal how individuals rhetorically shape the social media platforms and interpret their role in democratic discourse.
Originality/value
This research takes the rich field of studying tolerance toward extreme speech to new territory: the online realm where public discourse (and especially extreme discourse) is hosted more and more.
In the United States, journalists covering white nationalist groups find themselves in an impossible situation: how do you cover the newsworthy rallies-and the concerns raised by the local community-without providing a platform for hate speech? The present study conducts in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 18 journalists who have covered white nationalist rallies. Through the lens of field theory, this study seeks to understand how journalists conceive of their role in such coverage, how they situate themselves within the field, and how they articulate the best practices for this challenging form of reporting. This study finds that white nationalist rallies presented a challenge to journalistic habitus, and journalists responded by drawing from the well of experience and professional socialization.
By recruiting 368 US university students, this study adopted an online posttest-only between-subjects experiment to analyze the impact of several types of hate speech on their attitudes toward hate speech censorship. Results showed that students tended to think the influence of hate speech on others was greater than on themselves. Their perception of such messages’ effect on themselves was a significant indicator of supportive attitudes toward hate speech censorship and of their willingness to flag hateful messages.
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