Hate Speech

Name

Institution

Course Number and Name

Instructor

Date

Hate Speech

Hate speech has been happening all over the US targeting specific races, gender, ethnicity, disability, and religion. Hate speech is any form of writing or speech that is threatening or abusive and portrays preconceptions against a specific group based on their sexual orientation, religion, or race (MacAvaney et al., 2019). Different individuals spread hate speech in the name of freedom of speech through online and in-person platforms. The fact that people often engage in hate-speech-related actions nconsciously makes it even much difficult for people to avoid bringing harm to the affected. For instance, many people talk down on people from minority backgrounds using words that mock their heritage and culture without considering the possible consequences of their actions. This is because we grow up hearing different negative assertions about others, and since there is no effective strategy set by different governments to ensure people do not hate on others, we just continue joking around with hate-related words while ignoring the feelings of the concerned people. Hate speech causes immense psychological damage and generates a feeling of exclusion. Furthermore, most hate speeches are protected because the government finds it difficult to ban hate speech without limiting freedom of speech, and there is no legal definition of hate speech under our law. The hate crime reports in the United States are forwarded to the FBI by more than 15,000 precincts countrywide. However, it is reported that 87% of the precincts did not report any hate crime in 2017 (Sales, 2021). Meanwhile, race and ethnicity-based violence are increasing globally. So how are we going to prevent hate speech to decrease all these traumas caused by it? This paper will explore researches that have been done on survivors and their stories as well as other researchers that suggest different methods of prevention. Specifically, it will be focusing on examining the trauma racial hate speech causes and how it impacts society. It will provide a proper understanding of the hate speech within our societies and the trauma it causes to examine and recommend the possible forms of prevention methods.

Recent Hate-Speech Related Incidents

The annual hate crime statistics report by the FBI shows that more than 10,000 individuals in the United States reported having been victims of heat crime due to their ethnicity or race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability (Carrega, C., & Krishnakumar, 2021). Therefore, verbal attack on people is evidently on the rise according to the different events that happened recently such as anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ bias, anti-Black bias, and anti-Asian hate. The onset of COVID-19 has contributed to the increasing hate crimes against Asian people. Among the total hate speech-related reports, women accounted for 63.3% of the cases, and 48.1% of all reports involved at least one hateful assertion about anti-China or anti-immigrant rhetoric (Carrega, C., & Krishnakumar, 2021). More than a thousand people have experienced anti-Asian incidents ranging from verbal attacks to physical attacks since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the resumption of outdoor activities and schools as well as returning to workplaces, it is likely that the vulnerable such as seniors, women, and children will be at risk.

Furthermore, hate crimes in general increased by 13% with anti-Asian hate crimes rising more than 73% in 2020 (Sales, 2021). This shows that individuals from Asian countries especially China are likely to experience hate crimes. The pandemic is believed to have originated from China, and as such, most people attribute the current global crisis that has crippled economies and caused massive deaths to people of Asian descent prompting hateful actions against them. There are numerous incidents of anti-Asian hate crimes that have been reported and even tried in courts. For instance, Carolyn Heard was sentenced to at least 270 days of incarceration for perpetuating hate crimes against a member of the Asian community. Heard was charged with approaching an Asian person and threatening to kill the victim with a knife, saying, “I will kill you, you have coronavirus; go back to China.” This is one of the many cases that have been reported relating to anti-Asian hate crime. A report by Gover et al. (2020) shows the rise in hate crime incidents that connect Asian people to COVID-19, that is, an increase of 107% in 2020.

Another hate speech-related incident pertains to other minority groups such as African-Americans and Hispanics. Hate crimes against people of color have been evident in the United States for centuries dating back to slavery. Therefore, the issue of white supremacy has been the primary contributor to the unending hate crimes against people from Black and Hispanic communities. There are a lot of incidents where African American people have been harassed and verbally assaulted for their color. For instance, Dushko Vulchev of Houlton was reported to have sent messages of hate crime, calling out for all African Americans to be wiped. He also went on to burn down Martin Luther King Jr. Community Presbyterian Church in Springfield in December 2020. It is, therefore, clear that hate speech being just an assertion can further lead to physical violence. Furthermore, it is reported that hate crimes against Black people, that is, Anti-Black or African American hate crime increased in recent years from 1,972 to 2,871 in 2020 (Carrega, C., & Krishnakumar, 2021). The apparent increase in hate crimes on the basis of race or ethnicity shows the lack of proper laws that protect people from incidents of hate speech and other hate-related crimes. For instance, more than 56% of the total all cases of bias against African Americans comprised mainly of hate crimes offenses connecting to race, and are primarily motivated by anti-African American or Black bias (Gover et al., 2020).

The online and political rhetoric that stigmatizes people of color and people of Asian descent has promoted the continued increase in hate crime incidents. For instance, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s main campaign narrative was against people of color, the non-whites. Such situations make it hard for people to refrain from engaging in hating on non-whites, thus bolstering white supremacy. However, there is no proper definition of hate speech in the constitution nor effective ways to prevent people from engaging in abusive or threatening altercations based on color, sexual orientation, or religion. This has allowed numerous incidents of hate crime to go unreported, making it hard for people to be punished while allowing perpetrators to continue hating on others. Hate crimes against people from the LGBTQ community have been constantly reported in the past years making it also a key contributor to hate speech-related trauma. For instance, an FBI report shows that more than 1,300 cases, 19% of all reported hate crimes in 2018 stemmed from anti-LGBTQ bias (Fitzsimons, 2019). This is an increase from the 1,217 incidents reported in 2017. As such, this demonstrates that hate crimes cut across all domains and as such can cause a lot of harm.

Delivery of Hate Speech and Related Trauma

Hate speech can be conveyed in person or via other means of communication including online platforms and electronic devices. Many people have utilized social media platforms to perpetrate hate crimes since it allows them to establish anonymity and also invite others to join their campaign against their victims. For instance, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have allowed individuals to create pseudo-user accounts that they use to perpetrate hate-related crimes such as writing posts that attack individuals based on their ethnicity or race, religion, or sexual orientation. This, therefore, has contributed to a global increase in violence attributed to online, an outcome of issues of free speech and censorship on broadly used technology platforms (Bliuc et al., 2018). The primary victims of inflammatory speech online are people from minority backgrounds, mainly African Americans, Asians, and Latinos. Changes in political climate also encourage an increase in hate crime worldwide in which social media acts as the discord magnifier. The fact that nearly a third of the world are active Facebook users alone means that almost everyone uses a social media platform at any point in time, and as such, persons inclined to misogyny, racism, or homophobia perceive these tech platforms as avenues that reinforce their views (Alkiviadou, 2019). This is evident by the widespread use of social media by violent actors to publicize their acts including making statements that undermine the dignity of people from specific minority groups.

Notable examples of online hate crime are the white supremacist attacks circulating amongst racist communities online in the United States. The white supremacists utilize social media to communicate their acts to their followers. For instance, the Charleston church shooter who murdered nine black clergy and worshippers in 2015 was revealed to have engaged in an online self-learning process that gave him the idea that the white supremacists’ goal mandated violent action (Cohen-Almagor, 2018). Another hate crime incident is the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018 where the shooter was a member of the social media network Gab whose strict rules have appealed to many extremists expelled by larger platforms. The shooter’s participation in the tech platform imprinted in his mind the conspiracy that Jews wanted to bring immigrants into the U.S and render whites a minority. As a result, the shooter killed 11 worshippers at a refugee-themed Shabbat service (Cohen-Almagor, 2018). Racist communities such as the white supremacists have utilized online interaction platforms to propagate their ideologies and objectives that are meant to undermine nonwhite birth rates and immigration. Different anti-racial organizations use social media and other tech platforms to propagate hate-mongering posts that encourage them to hate on others within their respective communities. Hate groups can also use social media to organize and recruit their members as well as peddle conspiracies (Matamoros-Fernández & Farkas, 2021).

Online users’ experiences are mediated by algorithms designed and implemented in specific social media platforms to maximize user engagement, usually, unconsciously promoting extreme content. For instance, the auto-play function that allows the player to tees up a related video at the end of the video can be particularly pernicious (Matamoros-Fernández & Farkas, 2021). These algorithms entice individuals to view videos that encourage conspiracy theories that mislead or divide individuals in society. YouTube, therefore, is considered the most radicalizing channel of the twenty-first century. As such, YouTube announced in June 2019 that alteration in its recommendation algorithm managed to halve the views of contents that encouraged disseminating misinformation (Alkiviadou, 2019). It is therefore apparent that YouTube has been used as an avenue for brainwashing individuals by racist organizations and encouraging them to hate on the people of color and other minority groups. This has resulted in numerous negative impacts on the victims of hate crimes such as trauma and physical violence. For instance, cyberbullying online users is key to hate crime where individuals post photos of individuals with racist-related captions as well as share posts that body shame people or racially abuse other online users (Bankov, 2020). This is mainly because social media lack the editorial oversight of the massive contents posted daily which makes it hard to regulate what people post on their pages.

Furthermore, the artificial intelligence of social media accounts such as Facebook is poorly adapted to local languages with little effort by the company to employ and train staff who are fluent in these languages (Van Klinken & Aung, 2017). Employing insufficient staff who understand few local languages will encourage online users to propagate misleading information or incite other users to engage in racial violence. For instance, the anti-Muslim violence that started in 2012 was related to the conducive Facebook environment where ultranationalist Buddhist monks exploited to propagate hate speech to new Internet users who have been under a closed autocratic system for decades (Van Klinken & Aung, 2017). It was only after 700,000 Rohingya when Facebook admitted to having done too little to prevent it. As a result, Facebook banned military officials in 2018 and promised to employ more moderators with fluency in local languages. This will ensure that hate crimes that are conveyed using local language can be intercepted and their intent confirmed before it causes a lot of harm.

Consequently, the widespread online hate speech has profound effects on the victims. For instance, racial trauma is a major outcome of hate crime that is common worldwide. Hate and bias incidents are very common in colleges and campuses where students of color and students with disabilities experience discriminatory profiling. These students will find such experiences mentally and emotionally disturbing, thus resulting in trauma. This also applies to other members of the society who constantly face racial, religious, or sexual bias from white supremacists and those that consider minority groups as inferior (Cohen-Almagor, 2018). Therefore, persons who have encountered unexpected, emotionally painful racist encounter is predisposed to suffering race-based traumatic stress injury. Most victims of racial trauma in the United States are Black, Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) since they live under a system of white supremacy, making them more vulnerable. For instance, there are more than 1,500 incidents of anti-Asian racism that include verbal and physical attacks and anti-Asian discrimination of private businesses in just one month following the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States (Liu & Modir, 2020). Considering the fact that Asians were also affected by the pandemic both economically and health-wise, hating on them and attributing the pandemic to them can cause serious trauma injury. Some people have been brought up in an environment that encourages negative attitudes towards people of color and other religions. As such, this will prompt them to racially profile and discriminate unconsciously or consciously in an attempt to emulate their predecessors. A good example is a report where 38% of the Latinx population were attacked verbally for speaking Spanish in 2018 (Lockwood & Cuevas, 2020). They were referred to as racial slurs and unfairly treated by others while being asked to “go back to their countries.”

Other cases include the 4.2 million anti-Semitic Twitter tweets that addressed a myriad of racial slurs, stereotypes, conspiracy theories, and discrimination. Such incidents either individuals or systemic racist actions can cause vicarious traumatic stressors that result in detrimental impacts on mental health BIPOC just as direct traumatic stressors do (Chakraborti, 2018). Experiencing mentally disturbing incident that is meant to attack one’s race, sexual orientation, or religion can cause serious trauma. For example, access to videos online that pertain brutal killing of African American people such as one for the murder of George Floyd or other materials that expose the serious prejudice against people of color can cause traumatic stress reactions in the persons accessing the content, particularly those who identify with the victims. Therefore, with the increasing dominance of tech platforms that allow propagation of any form of content to billions of people worldwide, minority groups are more vulnerable to traumatic experiences and compromised well-being. This is because the Internet allows everybody to access any form of information, and as such, individuals such the people of color can see information regarding challenges their people have faced in the past and are still facing to date, resulting in transmitted trauma. A good example is the chattel enslavement of Africans in the United States and other nations that has prompted perpetual traumatic stress among the black communities. As such, the Black people have been developed a sustained collective trauma that predisposes them to vulnerability towards mental health illnesses (Myers & Lantz, 2020).

Furthermore, incidents such as the Holocaust have left the descendants of the event’s survivors to become vulnerable to establishing psychological disturbances which also adds to the stressors related to the Holocaust loss. The vulnerability developed by the descendants is directly related to the negative life encounters by predecessors. Therefore, it is clear that hate crimes do not only affect their immediate victims but can affect generations to come, resulting in sustained trauma. This is evident in the continued racial discrimination of Native Americans and the trauma they feel from the experience of their past generations. Specifically, Native Americans share a historical trauma resulting from massacres, boarding schools, and forced violent removal from their tribal lands reveals a fatal communal loss, serving as a source of traumatic stress and victims of racial prejudices (Vergani et al., 2021). Therefore, victims of hate crimes such as Native Americans, Latinx, and African Americans today continue to experience signs of substance dependence, depression, health disorders, and lack of employment as a result of trauma-related psychological impacts.

There are racially motivated hate crimes that happen in colleges and campuses across the United States that expose students to physical dangers as well as traumatic episodes that compromise the victims’ mental health. However, learning institutions do not have adequate resources required to respond to students’ needs effectively. In 2016, more than 1,000 hate crimes were reported on campuses, and as such, expensive mental health fees, long wait times, and lack of counseling staff diversity will continue to worsen the trauma experience by hate crime victims (Vergani et al., 2021). It is, therefore, apparent that hate crime can cause detrimental effects on the mental health of its victims, and therefore, it is necessary to find ways to prevent hate crime-related activities such as hate speech from perpetuating to future generations.

Hate Speech Prevention Methods

With the current advancement in technology and the continued rise in internet users around the globe, racist organizations or communities will find an easy niche for publicizing their actions and inciting others to join their course. It is, therefore, important to find possible prevention methods to ensure future hate crime incidents will not happen. Notably, education is the most effective approach that can be implemented to help people understand the dynamics of hate crimes such as how it manifests and its possible effects. Education will bolster awareness which in turn helps individuals especially kids to avoid hate-related crimes such as using abusive or threatening language that portrays prejudice against members of given minority groups (Evenden-Kenyon, 2020). Often, individuals who grow up in white supremacy environments end up continuing the tradition of hating on immigrants and other religions, and sometimes, without any known reason or unreasonably. These people perpetuate racial profiling and verbal attacks unconsciously, and as such, educate them about the existence of hate crimes and how they manifest and affect people in society. This will allow them to develop their perception of people especially those from minority backgrounds instead of depending on what they were told to do or what they observed others do. Teaching people to embrace diversity and equality will extremely promote the prevention of hate speech and other hate crimes that result in severe traumatic experiences (Evenden-Kenyon, 2020).

Social media is revealed to be a major contributor to hate crimes and related trauma, and as such, employing censoring algorithms that ensure people do not use racially sensitive words that promote hate crime against social media users (Siregar et al., 2020). As such, social media platforms should have detection methods for hate speech to reduce cyberbullying. This involves mandating social media companies to have adequate staff who monitors instances of hate speech in the posts and delete the accounts posting these posts as well as remove the posts and respective viewership. Another important detection approach that social media can implement is to employ sufficient staff with fluency in local languages to facilitate the detection of hate speech that is propagated using local languages (Chakraborti, 2018). Without moderators who understand local languages, social media users will post racial insults or slurs that will only be understood by the intended recipient, and as a result, the victim will suffer further insults since no one will intervene. Similarly, social media platforms should improve their customer services to ensure that inquiries and complaints are responded to in real-time to facilitate the proper reporting of hate crimes (Siregar et al., 2020). This is a major problem that victims of hate crime face since even when they try to report the experience of hate crime they rarely receive help, leaving them to live with the negative impacts such as trauma and physical harm. Therefore, with a proper reporting system, it makes it easy for incidents to be addressed at early stages, thus preventing instance people of color from experiencing brutal and prejudiced treatments.

Another important recommendation is the implementation of effective physical and online reporting systems in the communities and schools that provide anonymity. This is because most people tend to avoid reporting hate crimes with the fear that the perpetrators will come after them, and as such, they will continue to suffer at the hands of racist communities (Schweppe et al., 2020). As such, having an anonymous platform will enable individuals to report incidents in real-time which in turn will allow concerned authorities to enforce hate crime-related law accordingly. Schools also need to have adequate staff who provide counseling to victims of racial trauma to prevent transmitted trauma.

Conclusion

It is evident that hate speech is rampant in the current technological environment since most people have access to devices and are connected to the Internet. As such, perpetual hate speech that is prejudiced towards minority groups can cause serious impacts such as trauma that affects individuals bother mentally and physically. These impacts can be mitigated via extensive awareness programs, effective social media regulations, and proper reporting systems. However, these recommendations should be implemented with the balance between freedom of speech and hate speech. Policymakers should ensure that approaches to regulate social media platforms and allow people to freely and easily report hate crimes should not unjustifiably impair freedom of speech. For instance, social media platforms need to remain transparent on the contents they remove and make it easy for research and the public to scrutinize their data. Similarly, the authorities or those handling hate speech reported incidents should be fair in their judgment to ensure victims receive justice while preventing false accusations.

References

Alkiviadou, N. (2019). Hate speech on social media networks: towards a regulatory framework?. Information & Communications Technology Law, 28(1), 19-35.

Bankov, K. (2020). Cyberbullying and hate speech in the debate around the ratification of the Istanbul convention in Bulgaria: a semiotic analysis of the communication dynamics. Social Semiotics, 30(3), 344-364.

Bliuc, A. M., Faulkner, N., Jakubowicz, A., & McGarty, C. (2018). Online networks of racial hate: A systematic review of 10 years of research on cyber-racism. Computers in Human Behavior, 87, 75-86.

Carrega, C., & Krishnakumar, P. (2021, October 26). Hate crime reports in US Surge to the highest level in 12 years, FBI says. CNN. Retrieved November 29, 2021, from https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/30/us/fbi-report-hate-crimes-rose-2020/index.html.

Chakraborti, N. (2018). Responding to hate crime: Escalating problems, continued failings. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 18(4), 387-404.

Cohen-Almagor, R. (2018). Taking North American white supremacist groups seriously: The scope and the challenge of hate speech on the Internet. International journal of crime, justice, and social democracy, 7(2), 38-57.

Evenden-Kenyon, E. (2020). Educating the English: the role of universities in tackling hate speech and Islamaphobia in post-EU-Referendum Britain. Papeles de Europa, 32(2), 129-144.

Fitzsimons, T. F. (2019, November 12). Nearly 1 in 5 hate crimes motivated by anti-LGBTQ bias, FBI finds. NBCNews.com. Retrieved November 29, 2021, from https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/nearly-1-5-hate-crimes-motivated-anti-lgbtq-bias-fbi-n1080891.

Gover, A. R., Harper, S. B., & Langton, L. (2020). Anti-Asian hate crime during the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the reproduction of inequality. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 45(4), 647-667.

Liu, S. R., & Modir, S. (2020). The outbreak that was always here: Racial trauma in the context of COVID-19 and implications for mental health providers. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 12(5), 439.

Lockwood, S., & Cuevas, C. A. (2020). Hate crimes and race-based trauma on Latinx populations: a critical review of the current research. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 1524838020979688.

MacAvaney, S., Yao, H. R., Yang, E., Russell, K., Goharian, N., & Frieder, O. (2019). Hate speech detection: Challenges and solutions. PloS one, 14(8), e0221152.

Matamoros-Fernández, A., & Farkas, J. (2021). Racism, Hate Speech, and Social Media: A Systematic Review and Critique. Television & New Media, 22(2), 205-224.

Myers, W., & Lantz, B. (2020). Reporting racist hate crime victimization to the police in the United States and the United Kingdom: A cross-national comparison. The British Journal of Criminology, 60(4), 1034-1055.

Sales, B. (2021, September 2). FBI reports drop in 2020 antisemitic crimes, amid rise in total hate crimes. The Times of Israel. Retrieved November 29, 2021, from https://www.timesofisrael.com/fbi-reports-drop-in-2020-antisemitic-crimes-amid-rise-in-total-hate-crimes/.

Schweppe, J., Haynes, A., & MacIntosh, E. M. (2020). What is measured matters: The value of third party hate crime monitoring. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 26(1), 39-59.

Siregar, G., Siregar, S. A., & Silaban, R. (2020). Legal Implementation of Electronic Information and Transaction Law in Preventing the Spread of Content Containing SARA Issues through Social Media. International Journal of Innovation Crativity and Change, 13(10), 1418-1431.

Van Klinken, G., & Aung, S. M. T. (2017). The contentious politics of anti-Muslim scapegoating in Myanmar. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 47(3), 353-375.

Vergani, M., Navarro, C., Freilich, J. D., & Chermak, S. M. (2021). Comparing Different Sources of Data to Examine Trends of Hate Crime in Absence of Official Registers. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 46(3), 445-460.

Hate Speech

Name

Institution

Course Number and Name

Instructor

Date

Hate Speech

Hate speech has been happening all over the US targeting specific races, gender, ethnicity, disability, and religion. Hate speech is any form of writing or speech that is threatening or abusive and portrays preconceptions against a specific group based on their sexual orientation, religion, or race (MacAvaney et al., 2019). Different individuals spread hate speech in the name of freedom of speech through online and in-person platforms. The fact that people often engage in hate-speech-related actions nconsciously makes it even much difficult for people to avoid bringing harm to the affected. For instance, many people talk down on people from minority backgrounds using words that mock their heritage and culture without considering the possible consequences of their actions. This is because we grow up hearing different negative assertions about others, and since there is no effective strategy set by different governments to ensure people do not hate on others, we just continue joking around with hate-related words while ignoring the feelings of the concerned people. Hate speech causes immense psychological damage and generates a feeling of exclusion. Furthermore, most hate speeches are protected because the government finds it difficult to ban hate speech without limiting freedom of speech, and there is no legal definition of hate speech under our law. The hate crime reports in the United States are forwarded to the FBI by more than 15,000 precincts countrywide. However, it is reported that 87% of the precincts did not report any hate crime in 2017 (Sales, 2021). Meanwhile, race and ethnicity-based violence are increasing globally. So how are we going to prevent hate speech to decrease all these traumas caused by it? This paper will explore researches that have been done on survivors and their stories as well as other researchers that suggest different methods of prevention. Specifically, it will be focusing on examining the trauma racial hate speech causes and how it impacts society. It will provide a proper understanding of the hate speech within our societies and the trauma it causes to examine and recommend the possible forms of prevention methods.

Recent Hate-Speech Related Incidents

The annual hate crime statistics report by the FBI shows that more than 10,000 individuals in the United States reported having been victims of heat crime due to their ethnicity or race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability (Carrega, C., & Krishnakumar, 2021). Therefore, verbal attack on people is evidently on the rise according to the different events that happened recently such as anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ bias, anti-Black bias, and anti-Asian hate. The onset of COVID-19 has contributed to the increasing hate crimes against Asian people. Among the total hate speech-related reports, women accounted for 63.3% of the cases, and 48.1% of all reports involved at least one hateful assertion about anti-China or anti-immigrant rhetoric (Carrega, C., & Krishnakumar, 2021). More than a thousand people have experienced anti-Asian incidents ranging from verbal attacks to physical attacks since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the resumption of outdoor activities and schools as well as returning to workplaces, it is likely that the vulnerable such as seniors, women, and children will be at risk.

Furthermore, hate crimes in general increased by 13% with anti-Asian hate crimes rising more than 73% in 2020 (Sales, 2021). This shows that individuals from Asian countries especially China are likely to experience hate crimes. The pandemic is believed to have originated from China, and as such, most people attribute the current global crisis that has crippled economies and caused massive deaths to people of Asian descent prompting hateful actions against them. There are numerous incidents of anti-Asian hate crimes that have been reported and even tried in courts. For instance, Carolyn Heard was sentenced to at least 270 days of incarceration for perpetuating hate crimes against a member of the Asian community. Heard was charged with approaching an Asian person and threatening to kill the victim with a knife, saying, “I will kill you, you have coronavirus; go back to China.” This is one of the many cases that have been reported relating to anti-Asian hate crime. A report by Gover et al. (2020) shows the rise in hate crime incidents that connect Asian people to COVID-19, that is, an increase of 107% in 2020.

Another hate speech-related incident pertains to other minority groups such as African-Americans and Hispanics. Hate crimes against people of color have been evident in the United States for centuries dating back to slavery. Therefore, the issue of white supremacy has been the primary contributor to the unending hate crimes against people from Black and Hispanic communities. There are a lot of incidents where African American people have been harassed and verbally assaulted for their color. For instance, Dushko Vulchev of Houlton was reported to have sent messages of hate crime, calling out for all African Americans to be wiped. He also went on to burn down Martin Luther King Jr. Community Presbyterian Church in Springfield in December 2020. It is, therefore, clear that hate speech being just an assertion can further lead to physical violence. Furthermore, it is reported that hate crimes against Black people, that is, Anti-Black or African American hate crime increased in recent years from 1,972 to 2,871 in 2020 (Carrega, C., & Krishnakumar, 2021). The apparent increase in hate crimes on the basis of race or ethnicity shows the lack of proper laws that protect people from incidents of hate speech and other hate-related crimes. For instance, more than 56% of the total all cases of bias against African Americans comprised mainly of hate crimes offenses connecting to race, and are primarily motivated by anti-African American or Black bias (Gover et al., 2020).

The online and political rhetoric that stigmatizes people of color and people of Asian descent has promoted the continued increase in hate crime incidents. For instance, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s main campaign narrative was against people of color, the non-whites. Such situations make it hard for people to refrain from engaging in hating on non-whites, thus bolstering white supremacy. However, there is no proper definition of hate speech in the constitution nor effective ways to prevent people from engaging in abusive or threatening altercations based on color, sexual orientation, or religion. This has allowed numerous incidents of hate crime to go unreported, making it hard for people to be punished while allowing perpetrators to continue hating on others. Hate crimes against people from the LGBTQ community have been constantly reported in the past years making it also a key contributor to hate speech-related trauma. For instance, an FBI report shows that more than 1,300 cases, 19% of all reported hate crimes in 2018 stemmed from anti-LGBTQ bias (Fitzsimons, 2019). This is an increase from the 1,217 incidents reported in 2017. As such, this demonstrates that hate crimes cut across all domains and as such can cause a lot of harm.

Delivery of Hate Speech and Related Trauma

Hate speech can be conveyed in person or via other means of communication including online platforms and electronic devices. Many people have utilized social media platforms to perpetrate hate crimes since it allows them to establish anonymity and also invite others to join their campaign against their victims. For instance, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have allowed individuals to create pseudo-user accounts that they use to perpetrate hate-related crimes such as writing posts that attack individuals based on their ethnicity or race, religion, or sexual orientation. This, therefore, has contributed to a global increase in violence attributed to online, an outcome of issues of free speech and censorship on broadly used technology platforms (Bliuc et al., 2018). The primary victims of inflammatory speech online are people from minority backgrounds, mainly African Americans, Asians, and Latinos. Changes in political climate also encourage an increase in hate crime worldwide in which social media acts as the discord magnifier. The fact that nearly a third of the world are active Facebook users alone means that almost everyone uses a social media platform at any point in time, and as such, persons inclined to misogyny, racism, or homophobia perceive these tech platforms as avenues that reinforce their views (Alkiviadou, 2019). This is evident by the widespread use of social media by violent actors to publicize their acts including making statements that undermine the dignity of people from specific minority groups.

Notable examples of online hate crime are the white supremacist attacks circulating amongst racist communities online in the United States. The white supremacists utilize social media to communicate their acts to their followers. For instance, the Charleston church shooter who murdered nine black clergy and worshippers in 2015 was revealed to have engaged in an online self-learning process that gave him the idea that the white supremacists’ goal mandated violent action (Cohen-Almagor, 2018). Another hate crime incident is the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018 where the shooter was a member of the social media network Gab whose strict rules have appealed to many extremists expelled by larger platforms. The shooter’s participation in the tech platform imprinted in his mind the conspiracy that Jews wanted to bring immigrants into the U.S and render whites a minority. As a result, the shooter killed 11 worshippers at a refugee-themed Shabbat service (Cohen-Almagor, 2018). Racist communities such as the white supremacists have utilized online interaction platforms to propagate their ideologies and objectives that are meant to undermine nonwhite birth rates and immigration. Different anti-racial organizations use social media and other tech platforms to propagate hate-mongering posts that encourage them to hate on others within their respective communities. Hate groups can also use social media to organize and recruit their members as well as peddle conspiracies (Matamoros-Fernández & Farkas, 2021).

Online users’ experiences are mediated by algorithms designed and implemented in specific social media platforms to maximize user engagement, usually, unconsciously promoting extreme content. For instance, the auto-play function that allows the player to tees up a related video at the end of the video can be particularly pernicious (Matamoros-Fernández & Farkas, 2021). These algorithms entice individuals to view videos that encourage conspiracy theories that mislead or divide individuals in society. YouTube, therefore, is considered the most radicalizing channel of the twenty-first century. As such, YouTube announced in June 2019 that alteration in its recommendation algorithm managed to halve the views of contents that encouraged disseminating misinformation (Alkiviadou, 2019). It is therefore apparent that YouTube has been used as an avenue for brainwashing individuals by racist organizations and encouraging them to hate on the people of color and other minority groups. This has resulted in numerous negative impacts on the victims of hate crimes such as trauma and physical violence. For instance, cyberbullying online users is key to hate crime where individuals post photos of individuals with racist-related captions as well as share posts that body shame people or racially abuse other online users (Bankov, 2020). This is mainly because social media lack the editorial oversight of the massive contents posted daily which makes it hard to regulate what people post on their pages.

Furthermore, the artificial intelligence of social media accounts such as Facebook is poorly adapted to local languages with little effort by the company to employ and train staff who are fluent in these languages (Van Klinken & Aung, 2017). Employing insufficient staff who understand few local languages will encourage online users to propagate misleading information or incite other users to engage in racial violence. For instance, the anti-Muslim violence that started in 2012 was related to the conducive Facebook environment where ultranationalist Buddhist monks exploited to propagate hate speech to new Internet users who have been under a closed autocratic system for decades (Van Klinken & Aung, 2017). It was only after 700,000 Rohingya when Facebook admitted to having done too little to prevent it. As a result, Facebook banned military officials in 2018 and promised to employ more moderators with fluency in local languages. This will ensure that hate crimes that are conveyed using local language can be intercepted and their intent confirmed before it causes a lot of harm.

Consequently, the widespread online hate speech has profound effects on the victims. For instance, racial trauma is a major outcome of hate crime that is common worldwide. Hate and bias incidents are very common in colleges and campuses where students of color and students with disabilities experience discriminatory profiling. These students will find such experiences mentally and emotionally disturbing, thus resulting in trauma. This also applies to other members of the society who constantly face racial, religious, or sexual bias from white supremacists and those that consider minority groups as inferior (Cohen-Almagor, 2018). Therefore, persons who have encountered unexpected, emotionally painful racist encounter is predisposed to suffering race-based traumatic stress injury. Most victims of racial trauma in the United States are Black, Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) since they live under a system of white supremacy, making them more vulnerable. For instance, there are more than 1,500 incidents of anti-Asian racism that include verbal and physical attacks and anti-Asian discrimination of private businesses in just one month following the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States (Liu & Modir, 2020). Considering the fact that Asians were also affected by the pandemic both economically and health-wise, hating on them and attributing the pandemic to them can cause serious trauma injury. Some people have been brought up in an environment that encourages negative attitudes towards people of color and other religions. As such, this will prompt them to racially profile and discriminate unconsciously or consciously in an attempt to emulate their predecessors. A good example is a report where 38% of the Latinx population were attacked verbally for speaking Spanish in 2018 (Lockwood & Cuevas, 2020). They were referred to as racial slurs and unfairly treated by others while being asked to “go back to their countries.”

Other cases include the 4.2 million anti-Semitic Twitter tweets that addressed a myriad of racial slurs, stereotypes, conspiracy theories, and discrimination. Such incidents either individuals or systemic racist actions can cause vicarious traumatic stressors that result in detrimental impacts on mental health BIPOC just as direct traumatic stressors do (Chakraborti, 2018). Experiencing mentally disturbing incident that is meant to attack one’s race, sexual orientation, or religion can cause serious trauma. For example, access to videos online that pertain brutal killing of African American people such as one for the murder of George Floyd or other materials that expose the serious prejudice against people of color can cause traumatic stress reactions in the persons accessing the content, particularly those who identify with the victims. Therefore, with the increasing dominance of tech platforms that allow propagation of any form of content to billions of people worldwide, minority groups are more vulnerable to traumatic experiences and compromised well-being. This is because the Internet allows everybody to access any form of information, and as such, individuals such the people of color can see information regarding challenges their people have faced in the past and are still facing to date, resulting in transmitted trauma. A good example is the chattel enslavement of Africans in the United States and other nations that has prompted perpetual traumatic stress among the black communities. As such, the Black people have been developed a sustained collective trauma that predisposes them to vulnerability towards mental health illnesses (Myers & Lantz, 2020).

Furthermore, incidents such as the Holocaust have left the descendants of the event’s survivors to become vulnerable to establishing psychological disturbances which also adds to the stressors related to the Holocaust loss. The vulnerability developed by the descendants is directly related to the negative life encounters by predecessors. Therefore, it is clear that hate crimes do not only affect their immediate victims but can affect generations to come, resulting in sustained trauma. This is evident in the continued racial discrimination of Native Americans and the trauma they feel from the experience of their past generations. Specifically, Native Americans share a historical trauma resulting from massacres, boarding schools, and forced violent removal from their tribal lands reveals a fatal communal loss, serving as a source of traumatic stress and victims of racial prejudices (Vergani et al., 2021). Therefore, victims of hate crimes such as Native Americans, Latinx, and African Americans today continue to experience signs of substance dependence, depression, health disorders, and lack of employment as a result of trauma-related psychological impacts.

There are racially motivated hate crimes that happen in colleges and campuses across the United States that expose students to physical dangers as well as traumatic episodes that compromise the victims’ mental health. However, learning institutions do not have adequate resources required to respond to students’ needs effectively. In 2016, more than 1,000 hate crimes were reported on campuses, and as such, expensive mental health fees, long wait times, and lack of counseling staff diversity will continue to worsen the trauma experience by hate crime victims (Vergani et al., 2021). It is, therefore, apparent that hate crime can cause detrimental effects on the mental health of its victims, and therefore, it is necessary to find ways to prevent hate crime-related activities such as hate speech from perpetuating to future generations.

Hate Speech Prevention Methods

With the current advancement in technology and the continued rise in internet users around the globe, racist organizations or communities will find an easy niche for publicizing their actions and inciting others to join their course. It is, therefore, important to find possible prevention methods to ensure future hate crime incidents will not happen. Notably, education is the most effective approach that can be implemented to help people understand the dynamics of hate crimes such as how it manifests and its possible effects. Education will bolster awareness which in turn helps individuals especially kids to avoid hate-related crimes such as using abusive or threatening language that portrays prejudice against members of given minority groups (Evenden-Kenyon, 2020). Often, individuals who grow up in white supremacy environments end up continuing the tradition of hating on immigrants and other religions, and sometimes, without any known reason or unreasonably. These people perpetuate racial profiling and verbal attacks unconsciously, and as such, educate them about the existence of hate crimes and how they manifest and affect people in society. This will allow them to develop their perception of people especially those from minority backgrounds instead of depending on what they were told to do or what they observed others do. Teaching people to embrace diversity and equality will extremely promote the prevention of hate speech and other hate crimes that result in severe traumatic experiences (Evenden-Kenyon, 2020).

Social media is revealed to be a major contributor to hate crimes and related trauma, and as such, employing censoring algorithms that ensure people do not use racially sensitive words that promote hate crime against social media users (Siregar et al., 2020). As such, social media platforms should have detection methods for hate speech to reduce cyberbullying. This involves mandating social media companies to have adequate staff who monitors instances of hate speech in the posts and delete the accounts posting these posts as well as remove the posts and respective viewership. Another important detection approach that social media can implement is to employ sufficient staff with fluency in local languages to facilitate the detection of hate speech that is propagated using local languages (Chakraborti, 2018). Without moderators who understand local languages, social media users will post racial insults or slurs that will only be understood by the intended recipient, and as a result, the victim will suffer further insults since no one will intervene. Similarly, social media platforms should improve their customer services to ensure that inquiries and complaints are responded to in real-time to facilitate the proper reporting of hate crimes (Siregar et al., 2020). This is a major problem that victims of hate crime face since even when they try to report the experience of hate crime they rarely receive help, leaving them to live with the negative impacts such as trauma and physical harm. Therefore, with a proper reporting system, it makes it easy for incidents to be addressed at early stages, thus preventing instance people of color from experiencing brutal and prejudiced treatments.

Another important recommendation is the implementation of effective physical and online reporting systems in the communities and schools that provide anonymity. This is because most people tend to avoid reporting hate crimes with the fear that the perpetrators will come after them, and as such, they will continue to suffer at the hands of racist communities (Schweppe et al., 2020). As such, having an anonymous platform will enable individuals to report incidents in real-time which in turn will allow concerned authorities to enforce hate crime-related law accordingly. Schools also need to have adequate staff who provide counseling to victims of racial trauma to prevent transmitted trauma.

Conclusion

It is evident that hate speech is rampant in the current technological environment since most people have access to devices and are connected to the Internet. As such, perpetual hate speech that is prejudiced towards minority groups can cause serious impacts such as trauma that affects individuals bother mentally and physically. These impacts can be mitigated via extensive awareness programs, effective social media regulations, and proper reporting systems. However, these recommendations should be implemented with the balance between freedom of speech and hate speech. Policymakers should ensure that approaches to regulate social media platforms and allow people to freely and easily report hate crimes should not unjustifiably impair freedom of speech. For instance, social media platforms need to remain transparent on the contents they remove and make it easy for research and the public to scrutinize their data. Similarly, the authorities or those handling hate speech reported incidents should be fair in their judgment to ensure victims receive justice while preventing false accusations.

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