Sorting through the Literature on Digital Hate

The next ICA 2024 conference session is on incivility in digital environments, and starts with Stephanie Bührer, presenting a scoping review on digital hate. This includes any kind of digitally disseminated hostile content directed against individuals or collectives, and includes forms such as cyberbullying, online incivility, online hate speech, trolling, harassment, and other phenomena.

Such concepts are often operationalised very inconsistently and interchangeably. Various of these behaviours are conflated, while certain concepts are understood in very different ways by different studies. The present study categories such forms of digital hate as either holistic or specific: comprised of a range of distinct behaviours, or identifying hate as a distinct behaviour in its own right. Also, existing studies tend to focus on such hate directed towards a generic target, a romantic or sexual interest, or miscellaneous specific groups.

Additionally, factors addressed by such studies as driving the incidence of digital hate can be broadly categorised into personal, social, and environmental factors. Such factors may be very unevenly distributed across the various forms of digital hate.

Some 512 articles were included in this scoping review of the literature. China, the US, and Spain are most prominently represented in this literature, with a substantial focus on holistic digital hate addressing a generic target (53%); specific digital hate of all forms only accounted for 30% of all studies. Connections with offline hate were mare only rarely. Perpetrators’ motives were also covered only very rarely.

More consistent definitions of such hate are urgently needed, then, as are more precise descriptions of these behaviours. Motives also need to be studied in substantially more detail.