Fighting Hate Speech on Social Media: The Challenge of “Deep Work” in Digital Peacebuilding

The rise in efforts to fight hate speech is representative of the bigger trend of taking peacebuilding online, yet the phenomenon of hate speech clearly predates the internet age. This chapter argues that contemporary efforts struggle to address the deeper drivers of conflict that are also related to hate speech. Hate speech plays a role in inciting mass violence, encouraging extremism, and undermining democracy, but also provides the justifications for maintaining inequality, discrimination, and oppression that often underpin violent conflict. However, efforts to fight hate speech on social media tend to focus more on curtailing its immediate role in violence than its intermediate role in reproducing the conditions of violence. Presenting a study of efforts to fight hate speech in Sri Lanka, the chapter suggests that countering social media hate speech tends to focus on the detection of words (lexicalism), the analysis of data for conflict-preventative purposes (dashboardism), the reporting and removal of hate speech (deletionism), a joint reactionary response that advances alternative narratives (crowd-counterism), and a rights-based approach focused on regulating contemporary expressions of hate speech (presentism). Overall, the chapter argues that these technical solutions do relatively little to address the underlying, historically conditioned socio-economic dimensions of conflict.