Understanding and Countering Hate: Politics, Technologies and Culture

Eveleen K. Sidana highlights how hate distorts, displaces, and erodes diversity, normalised further by digital technologies.

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As we commemorate 18th June as the International Day for Countering Hate Speech, we face many questions about the insidious workings of hate as well as the challenge of dealing with its ominous effects. On one hand unadulterated hate finds its way into our ordinary lives through words, behaviour and action so much so that even formal policies on immigrants appear to be driven by its negating effects. For example, the Rohingya have been persecuted under successive regimes in their own country, Myanmar, amplified by hatred fueled by online social media platforms such as Facebook. They have also been targets of misinformation and hate in countries where they migrated as refugees fleeing genocide (Guzman, 2022).

On the other, there are voices of reason calling for solidarity, inclusion, thought and deliberation over how intense affective politics of hatred engulfs people, and particularly, youth. For hate, and its accompanying emotions of anxiety, insecurity, suspicion, not only dehumanise and wound those that are targeted but also those who hate – as the latter feel that they have taken control of the situation. This feeling of taking control appears to respond to a state of precarity of those who hate at a personal, social, economic and political level. 

Hate allows for such a displacement from context to social identity to occur as vulnerable groups can be held responsible for complex, structural and multi-factored issues such as inflation, unemployment and climate distress. I suggest that firstly, we need to understand how hate is not a response to identities. Instead it actively shapes and frames identities. Secondly, this encompassing hate needs to be tackled beyond its association with identities and by considering the act of speaking hate itself as an act of violence. Thirdly, if hate is a response to the political and socio-economic uncertainty that the youth particularly face today, then greater awareness and response to the conditions that normalise hate are needed. This would require a critical and integrated approach involving educational institutions, industry, media and law.

How do we define the boundaries of hate speech? Is it individual or social or is it both? Section 196 of the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita (henceforth BNS) lays down punishment for promoting enmity between different groups, targeting groups of people based on religion, place of birth, residence, race, caste and communities, through words, symbols, actions and conduct. Sections 298 & 299 further deal with outraging religious feelings.  Hate speech is about hurting the dignity of an individual as a member of a group or of a particular identity, advocating threatening violence against a group of people based on their identity, inciting wrongful and criminal action against any group of people. Is it enough to apologise for being hateful or dismiss it as an isolated instance of ill humour? Can we counter hate at an individual level, or would it require a systematic effort and collective approach? For even if it is articulated at an individual level, hate speech has the force of language as it can be used to identify and represent entire communities. For example, use of terminologies like ​‘love jihad’ or ​‘terrorist’ in reference to the Muslim community members create a grammar of hate that gets normalised when repeated. Is it possible to address the crowd mentality that fuels hate speech? Can we call the wounding capacities of words as ​“assaultive discourse”? 1For conceptualising hate as discourse allows us to question the powerful actors and institutions that support it. But what does hate do? How does it shape bodies and minds?

What does hate do?

‘It takes a village to raise a person; it takes a village to hate one.’2

Hate has often been defined as a negation of the dignity of a person or community. As discussed above, hate negates on the basis of gender, caste, race, religion and sexuality. To understand hate, however, we must also ask what does hate create or affirm? What kind of social relations does it generate beyond what it negates? Hate places the person who is ​‘othered’ squarely at the center of a group identity fixing the otherwise fluid boundaries of identity and personhood. Because of the way the bundle of powerful emotions circulate, fix and reify identities, it has been used as an effective political tool to polarise, as we shall see later.

The group of people who could have been part of a multitude teeming with differences and creativity get hemmed in with few strokes and splashes of hate. The politics of hate (mis)represents by creating sameness where there was diversity and cancels the voice of the ​‘other.’  Further, the social and cultural politics of hate and its intimidating effects erase inter- and intra-community interactions and relations in the present and their potential in the future. Hate aligns some against those others (Ahmed, 2004).

“Because we love, we hate, and hate is what brings us together,” writes Sara Ahmed of the white nationalists who essentialise their own identities through rage against mixed racial couples, giving foreign aid, or immigrants. For it is not just a disagreement over social, political or economic issues or cultural frictions between people. Hate is simultaneously visceral and embodied, and personal and communal. Hate shapes minds and bodies in ways similar to our response to the fear of Covid-19 virus. We saw during the pandemic how certain bodies of the poor, the Muslim, the migrant workers were seen as carriers of the virus and therefore marked out as threatening figures coalescing fear and uncertainty with hate and framing differences as dangerous. 

When the emotion and speech acts of hate are repeated, they gain meaning and force fixing social boundaries. For example, the repeated language of hate between the Hindu and Muslim communities fixes the relation between the two communities and fixes their self-identification as well. Despite being an unstable force, hate gets used as a political and cultural tool to maintain power relations and normalise oppression. But how does hate normalise oppression? 

While the anonymity allows social media users to weaponise hate, the algorithms of social media incentivise hate because they allow for continued engagement in an economic system in which attention is commoditised and monetised so that the greater the attention captured, the higher the profit.

Digital Platforms: Habituated to hate

In the critically acclaimed Netflix series Adolescence (2025) directed by Philip Barantini, a teenager, Jamie Miller, is accused of murdering a girl who is his classmate. Investigations by police and psychiatric evaluation reveal Jamie’s strongly held beliefs and attitude towards women emanating from deeply held and actively ingrained gender stereotypes. The series showed how it was not just the teenager but also his family that faced backlash from the community and got isolated.

The series expresses the deep-rooted nature of hate as it gets ingrained in the subconscious before young minds even have the tools to process how they became aligned and accustomed to extreme thoughts leading to loss of life – their own as well as those of others. It becomes painfully evident that there are victims on both sides of this mounting wall even when everything appears normal on the surface. Many women have been targeted and continue to be subjected to threats of brutal sexual violence for expressing disagreements or just by association with any person who has expressed a divergent opinion or a disagreement than those of the virtual majority view. The more hate becomes viral, the more it mobilises, intensifies and alienates. The circulation of hate itself produces dangerous occasions of violence such as lynchings, mob violence and riotous situations have demonstrated time and again. 

In the Bully Bai case, images of women of minority communities were displayed online in a fake auction hurting their dignity and fetishising their bodies. In many such cases it is the youth who get mobilised to hate by the act of repeated articulation as well as the technologies of amplification. Can we really ignore these speeches and acts of visceral hate as a few sporadic cases of brainwashed people? 

Section 353(2) of the BNS acknowledges and lays out the punishment for the use of electronic means used to circulate misinformation, rumours and create enmity between different groups of people based on ​“religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, caste or community or any ground whatsoever.” However, to really arrest the use of digital technologies in amplifying hate, we must understand what the digital medium affords when it allows infinite circulation of emotions, what it offers as anonymity, and how it seduces and habituates so that a potentially violent and extreme act also appears mundane. Safiya Noble, UCLA Race and Technology Center, in her work Algorithms of Oppression demonstrated that social media platforms have intrinsic racial and gender biases and their presentation as neutral technology is a myth. While the anonymity allows social media users to weaponise hate, the algorithms of social media incentivise hate because they allow for continued engagement in an economic system in which attention is commoditised and monetised so that the greater the attention captured, the higher the profit.3 Mediated by digital networks, hate becomes seductive and captivating. This seduction is engineered externally through the modes of engagement by the platforms and internally through the algorithms of social media platforms. Both habituate to hate their largest constituency — young and impressionable minds like Jamie Miller. 

“Tackling Hate Speech is the responsibility of all – governments, societies, private sector, starting with individual women and men. All are responsible, all must act.”

Normalising Violence

The powers that stabilise hate today are political and cultural but also technological. In 2023, the Minister of Information, Government of Karnataka, announced that they would institute a center for monitoring hate and misinformation. Bangalore city police have been monitoring online social media for hate and propaganda since 2021. Recently, a Special Action force has been instituted to monitor communal crimes and hate speeches in three districts in the state. India Hate Lab, Project of Centre for the Study of Organized Hate, Washington D.C., had previously published reports on the organised nature of hate speeches targeting minority communities, particularly the Muslim communities. They have documented 1,165 such instances of hate speech in 2024, a 74 percent increase since 2023 (Hate Speech Events in India, Report 2024). These speech acts of hate not only remain within the timeframe of an event but get amplified and intensified by big media and social media. They fix inter-community and intra-community relations, framing the politics of the present but also narrowing political possibilities in the future.  Social media platforms carrying hate messages have the effect of normalising violence but also desensitising youth as they are the largest consumers of social media. While intense emotions circulate, digital media platforms desensitise making it easier to speed up the economy of hate. How then do we deal with this dichotomy that mostly affects the youth, on the one hand desensitising them and on the other intensifying emotions leading to drastic acts of violence against certain groups of people?

Tackling Hate

The principles that guide the United Nations Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech (2019) express that ​“Tackling Hate Speech is the responsibility of all – governments, societies, private sector, starting with individual women and men. All are responsible, all must act.” To tackle hate speech, we not only have to consider the political, social and cultural impact and outcomes, but we must consider hate speech itself as an act of violence. This violence needs to be tackled beyond the judicial sphere. Considering hate speech as an act of violence can help us understand the desensitisation of youth to violence through the capture of attention by digital media as well as its simultaneous emotional intensification by circulation. Appreciating the fact that communal, misogynist, racial and casteist hate is mediated by digital media also requires serious deliberation on the policies that regulate social media and digital platforms beyond debates of privacy. It also requires that we consciously understand our social media consumption as actions that create sub-cultures and processes that shape publics. 

Hate encompasses, defines, discriminates, fixes and habituates. It anchors identities and generates fear.  To deal with its devastating and long-lasting effects, we need to systematically diagnose how young people encounter, react to as well as participate in hate speech as a social practice. It is here that educational institutes can play a significant role in researching the hate ecosystem and equipping young minds to tackle the myriad mechanisms of misinformation that have played a central role in launching and magnifying hate. This would help us create preparatory tools to deal with hatred and its consequences at a cultural and social level as well as open the blackbox by which digital platforms promote hate.

References:

About the author:

Eveleen K Sidana is a faculty at Azim Premji University, Bhopal. She is an ethnographer and works at the intersection of urban spaces, media and digital technologies. She is enthusiastic about city streets and exploring the spontaneity of urban spaces and cultures.

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  1. see Delgado (1982)↩︎

  2. This sentence is inspired by a dialogue in the feature film Spotlight (2015) that showed how the Boston Globe investigated child sexual abuse scandal by the Roman Church in Boston. The dialogue: ‘it takes a village to raise a child; it takes a village to abuse one.’↩︎

  3. see Davenport and Beck’s book The Attention Economy, (2002).↩︎

Attribution