ABSTRACT

This chapter explores understandings of online hate speech and its social control from institutional and corporate perspectives. Hate speech has increasingly become a source of societal and political concern across the globe, as witnessed by recent measures and initiatives to tackle it. The European institutions are major social actors with regard to hate speech, but they are fundamentally different. Bookmarks reproduces the Council of Europe’s 1997 definition and in so doing sustains an understanding of hate speech across time, 20 years, and also across medium since it serves to define hate speech online. Hate speech is clearly a global phenomenon and one which rests on some form of intergroup antagonism. Hate speech then feeds off conflict, but it also can feed into it as illustrated most strikingly by cases of genocide and atrocities in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, Kenya and the Balkans.