Social Media and the Kurdish Issue in Turkey: Hate Speech, Free Speech and Human Security

Abstract

Parallel to two intertwined processes of the politicization of ethnicity, religion and sexuality on the one hand, and the rise of the internet, on the other hand, hate speech has become one of the most topical issues of political debates. Academic interest on this topic has so far focused largely on the questions of (im)possibility of defining hate speech, on the hate speech/free speech dichotomy, and, thus on the possible ways of dealing with this big challenge of our times. This study tries to open a new window by resorting to the concept of human security. It argues that rival understandings of security (traditional or critical) lead to differences in perceptions of threats/harms which in turn lead to different conceptions of hate speech. This argument is illustrated through an analysis of the way the Kurdish issue in Turkey has been tackled in Ekşi Sözlük, one of the most popular web sites in the country.

Hate Spin: The Twin Political Strategies of Religious Incitement and Offense-Taking

“…These could be designed to respond to a far broader range of harms. Scholars working in this area have suggested that we look at how hate propaganda subjects minorities to "moral injury" (Veninga, 2016, p. 28), and undermines their "human security" (Onbasi, 2015) and their right to participate as equal citizens (Fiss, 1998;Waldron, 2012).…”

Engaging with the claim of Roma people through twitter: who is behind the hashtags?

“…As used for political activism by protesters in ongoing democratization processes and advocating for the end of dictatorial regimes (Bruns et al, 2013), for gender equality and the end of sexual harassment, such as in the Me Too Movement (Quan-Haase et al, 2021), or for the rights of LGBT people (Becker and Copeland, 2016), to mention some examples, social media networks and cyberactivism have been also central for the denounce of situations of human rights violations suffered by ethnic and cultural minorities worldwide. Particularly relevant was the role played by social media to denounce the situation of violence and abuse in the case of the Black Lives Matter movement, but also against the Kurds (Onbasi, 2015), the Muslim ethnic Rohingyas (Elysayed, 2020), or the rights violations suffered by refugees including women in their journey and arrival to Europe in recent years (Dekker et al, 2018).…”

The Challenges of Regulating Hate Speech on Social Media in Light of the Theory of Freedom of Expression

“…Hate speech on social media has created new problems, demanding the creation of new definitions of the term in order to properly govern it. 138 Online hate speech has unique qualities such as tenacity, itinerancy, anonymity, and transnationality, despite the fact that there is no fundamental difference in effect. First, hate speech can linger online for a long time, resurfacing in many ways across multiple platforms.…”