ABSTRACT
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. For instance, the Japanese Parliament introduced its first hate speech law in 2016 to deal with rising ethnic tensions, particularly directed towards residents of Korean descent; the Law Commission in India has proposed a tightening up of hate speech law because of heightened anti-minority political rhetoric; the European Commission and the major global technology companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) agreed on a code of conduct in 2016 to remove illegal hate speech from their platforms within 24 hours; the Norwegian government announced in 2017 a strategy against hateful expressions. At the same time, in the wake of political upheavals, increased migration and terrorist attacks, what might be viewed as trigger events (Burnap and Williams, 2015), there have been reports from human rights organisations and official institutions of a rise in hate incidences against minorities in many countries, including the US, the UK, Germany, France, Poland, Turkey, South Sudan, China and Russia. The internet offers a myriad of spaces where hate speech thrives and, although difficult to monitor, there are indications that incidences of hate speech online are rising (Banks, 2010; Bartlett et al., 2014; Foxman and Wolf, 2013; Gagliardone et al., 2015). It is these online environments that are attracting increasing political attention.
