بررسی سخنان نفرت انگیز در زمینه شبکه های اجتماعی آنلاین Hate speech review in the context of online social networks

1. Introduction Hate speech and terrorism are very common and closely related activities. Initially to carry out these activities messages are communicated using traditional social networks, such as broadcast television, broadcast radio, newspapers, etc. Nowadays the online social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube are using for the same purpose. Speech is a nontrivial tool to communicate ideas, beliefs, feelings and any other form of information from one to another. Generally verbal and symbolic information is used to communicate over the social networks. With the intention of balancing societal betterment and individual rights, the speech can be considered as free speech and its variant as hate speech. Free speech is required to maintain democratic rights of an individual by facilitating the exchange of their opinions. Free speech provides an autonomous enjoyment to a person. The freedom of expression may be one of the causes to occur hate speech. Therefore hate speech to be considered as a descendant of free speech. Expressing hate speech has become a trend and people are using this as a shortcut way to get instant popularity without putting more effort. Hate speech creates a situation to test the limits of free speech. Hate speech is handled by different regulations in different countries. Hate speech usually opposes freedom of speech and violates fundamental rights of a human being. The broader goal of the freedom of expression is to assist every individual to achieve self-fulfillment, discover the truth and strengthen oneself, establish an acceptable balance between stability and changes in society. It also allows everyone to create his/her own beliefs and communicate them to others freely (Bhandari and Bhatt, 2012). Hate speech will act as an obstacle to these goals. The impact of hate speech is not same in all instances, depends on the person involved, content, location, and circumstances. This indicates that who, what, where and a circumstance determines the impact of a hate speech and its control. Hate speech may harm the victims directly or indirectly. In direct hate speech, the victims are injured immediately by the contents of hate speech. In an indirect hate speech, the harm may be immediate or delayed, the delayed harm is perpetrated by the agents, not by an original actor. For instance, the hate speech on racism in public meetings might motivate other racists to initiate harassment, intimidation, violence and so on (Seglow, 2016). Figure 1 shows the role of online social networks for destructive activities such as hate speech, hate crime, extremism, and terrorism. Hate speech is made spreadable by posting a message, reposting a message and responding to a message on social networks. Hate crime is a hate-motivated physical attack and social networks are used for planning and executing the attack related activities. Extremists and terrorists use social networks for contacting and recruiting like-minded persons, spreading propaganda, planning and executing the attacks.