Monitoring Centre
on Hate Speech Online
Assuming that hate speech is a form of crime resistant to counter-strategies, the monitoring centre on Hate Speech Online aims at identifying, listing and investigating online hate speech targeting particular online communities.
Cyber-bullying and sexist tweets, fake news from social media, and a generalised feeling of intolerance towards migrants, ethnic minorities, women, LGBTIQ+ and obese people (among others) fuel online hate. The monitoring centre, therefore, sets out to investigate and fight the phenomenon of hate speech online (HSO) and cyber-bullying with the purpose of unveiling a common linguistic and semiotic ‘grammar’ of hate directed against minority groups. It will scrutinize recurring semiotic strategies that are co-deployed to disseminate and perpetuate discrimination towards any form of social diversity. Through the study of the main mechanisms construing HSO, the monitoring centre aims at the development of a multi-semiotic model that will help linguists and educators to practically and actively engage in the fight against hate speech and cyber-bullying.
The monitoring centre has the broader scope of tackling important issues in the attempt to redress the balance between freedom of speech and language aggression. Hate comments from users often originate from amplified, distorted or false news, amidst growing evidence that misinformation on social media is reproduced by polarised groups, including highly conservative or racist and gender-biased users. Against this backdrop, a series of investigations carried out by the members of the monitoring centre will help create an archive of data collected from social media platforms representative of instances of hate speech, thus enabling the creation of a grammar of hate directed against minority groups.
