ABSTRACT
The motivations for this book are to conceptualize, analyze, and interpret a crucial yet understudied aspect of online hate: the social processes generating, reinforcing, shaping, and diffusing that content. The chapters focus on diverse contexts, platforms, data, methodologies, and processes of online hate. They are groundbreaking, thoughtful, well-justified, rigorous, and detailed. This chapter summarizes ways in which they are also interesting, and why it is theoretically, practically, and existentially imperative to understand the social nature of online hate and to avoid the myopia of considering online hate as just excesses of extreme individuals. The chapter also summarizes the background, conference, and considerable iterations and discussions resulting in these chapters and summarizes the main focus of each chapter in the book.
