Abstract:

Both scholarly and policy work around hate speech and online hate speech, have recognized the importance of a better understanding of the phenomena, but have tended to prioritize imperatives to detect, contain, and even punish them. This tendency has been further facilitated by the growing availability of tools able to algorithmically process and analyze large quantities of text. Despite ambitious research seeking to map the emergence of hate speech in different national contexts and the targeting of specific groups, including correlations between online hate speech and actual violence, there are limited attempts to bring forward the ways that on line hate speech relates to local cultural values and power inequalities.

Project LEAD-Online: Learn, Engage, Act: Digital Tools to Prevent and Counter Hate Speech Online - CERV-2021-EQUAL- 101049379 is funded through CERV and it has been designed to address the need to strengthen critical thinking and digital & media literacy skills in young people, teachers and social media activists in 7 European countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, Italia, Romania and Greece).

Drawing on data collected through a Hate Speech Online -Self Assessment Tool (HS-SAT)- developed as part of the LEAD Online project - this paper analyses the responses of approximately 500 students and educators in Ioannina, the capital city of the Epirus region in North Western Greece. Epirus is a predominantly mountainous area and one of the poorest regions in Greece, with a GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita at approximately 46% of the European average (Eurostat, 2023). The area, for the largest part of the 20th C (century) up to 1980s has been defined as a region of emigrants, both towards northern Europe but also to major Greek cities. However, during the last decade of the 20th C and the first two decades of the 21st C, the area has received immigrants, initially (during the 90s and 00s) from neighbouring Albania and the Balkans and lately from Asia and Africa, mainly refugees and asylum seekers. In our paper we attempt to relate these societal and historical characteristics of the region with the ways HSO is understood and expressed by actors in the educational community, identifying local specificities on a global phenomenon. Our primary concern lies at trying to raise questions on the ways that HSO takes on local forms and connects to contexts where the opportunities to affect change are fewer and power inequalities are stark; thus opening up on interventions that will take into account the local cultural landscape.

It is our strong belief that, if contemporary forms of hate speech are strictly interconnected with what Chantal Mouffe has referred to as the “moralization of politics” (Mouffe, 2005), then what an educational community in the periphery of Europe has to tell us, can offer valuable insights to developing a fuller understanding of the link between the rise of online hate speech and processes through which power and politics are exercised more broadly.

References:
[1] Mouffe, C. (2005). On the Political. Psychology Press.
[2] Eurostat, 2023. GDP per capita, consumption per capita and price level indices, s.l.: s.n

Keywords:

Hate speech online, inclusion, diversity, education.