How to Combat the Internets Hate Problem
Transcriber: Christina F. Emil
Reviewer: David DeRuwe
I want to start off by taking you
way back to January 10th, 1980.
Do you remember what
you were doing that day?
Were you even born then?
That’s the day my family
arrived in Canada.
You see, we were members
of the Baha’i faith,
a religious minority in Iran
that was persecuted.
But we were lucky.
Canada offered us citizenship,
something I’ll always
be grateful to Canada for.
When we arrived at our local town,
the newspaper even featured us.
That picture is of me as a small child.
When I arrived at school,
most of kids were really friendly,
but then a few characters came up to me
and said, “Go free the hostages in Iran.”
OK, first of all, it’s not “I-ran,”
it’s “Ee-ron,” but not a big deal.
I let that one go, but did these kids
think I could free the hostages?
I was a child, after all -
not a good starting point.
This is way before the internet,
so I couldn’t even reach
the decision maker if I wanted to.
But I think what they
were really trying to say is,
“You don’t belong; you’re not one of us.”
It’s the same feeling
a lot of immigrants get.
They feel rejected by their old country,
and they’re not fully embraced
by their new country, right?
I’m sure some of you experienced that.
Exclusion, hate, and prejudice,
of course, are not new.
What’s new, however, is that much
of this has now gone online.
Increasingly online,
we’re seeing a lot of acts of violence
also tied to this hate.
For example, in 2017,
we saw hundreds of thousands of people
ethnically cleansed in Myanmar
because of communication
that was going on Facebook beforehand.
In Christchurch, New Zealand,
where I used to be a professor,
we saw Muslims gunned down at two mosques.
Over 50 Muslims were killed.
In the United States,
we’ve seen a number of these as well,
a number of acts of hate-driven violence
against particular ethnic groups.
We saw African-Americans killed
in a church in Charleston, South Carolina,
we saw Jews killed
in the synagogue in Pittsburgh,
we saw Hispanics killed in El Paso, Texas,
and recently we saw Asian Americans
targeted in Atlanta, right?
So we’ve seen these
across many parts of the country,
targeting many different groups.
But what can we do about hate
when we see it online?
That’s what I want to talk about today.
I want to talk about five lessons
from academic research
that you can use yourself
when you see hate online
that can potentially
help reduce that hate.
Now, when we talk about hate speech,
we have to realize that the most
dangerous kind of hate speech
is against groups of people.
Here, an entire group
is cast as a negative stereotype,
and if you can successfully do this,
then everyone in that group is responsible
for the negative acts of one,
and they’re all somehow at fault, right?
The entire group becomes blamed.
So when you see this online,
we see negative stereotypes online,
what you can do is try to break that up.
What you’re doing when you kind of
collectivize people in the negative whole
is you kind of dehumanize them.
They become a collective mass
and not individuals anymore.
So what you can do
is to individualize them again
and talk about individuals in positive
ways from that group, right?
So you take collective
negative stereotypes,
and you talk about individuals
in a positive light.
That’s the first lesson
that you can try if you see it online.
The second lesson has to do
with contradictory positions
that people often have, right?
Sometimes people have
very positive views of the wrong group
and very negative
views of another group, right?
And so somehow they’re kind of
holding a double standard,
and you can tap into that
in your communication with people
to try to unpack prejudice.
Let me talk about one study
that’s really interesting in this regard.
People were asked: “Should
Muslims be collectively blamed
for the terrorist act
of a particular Muslim?”
A number of people said, “Yes.”
Then they were put in scenarios
where they were presented
with an act of terrorism by a Christian,
and they were asked
if Christians be blamed.
Many people said, “No, of course not.
My group can’t be blamed
for the act of an individual.
That’s just a crazy person, right?”
And then they were asked again,
“Should Muslims be blamed
for the collective actions,
the negative actions
of an individual collectively?”
Some people who said “Yes,”
then said “No” -
they realized they had
this kind of double standard,
this hypocritical position.
What was rightly going on there
is that they had
cognitive dissonance, right?
They had this kind of contradiction
going on in their mind.
And so to alleviate that,
they had to shift their position
to have cognitive consistency.
People like to have cognitive consistency,
so you can tap into that
to challenge a lot of hate and prejudice,
which really is irrational
if you actually dig down into it.
So that’s lesson number two.
Lesson number three, we communicate
with people, try to be credible,
and to be credible,
that means you often don’t come
from your own point of view,
but you try to tap into people
that are held in high regard
by the group you’re trying
to influence, right?
And this might be passed
to them by a leader,
but it can also be special text
that they hold in high regard,
maybe a constitution or holy book.
There are many lofty statements
in these kinds of texts -
if you can tap into those,
you’ll more likely convince people
that might come
from a different point of view
than talking about it yourself.
So try that, try to come across
with credibility.
That’s lesson number three.
Lesson number four.
When you see hate online,
what you often want to do is call
that person a hater or a racist, right,
but try to avoid this temptation
because this is often counterproductive.
Try to engage in constructive dialogue,
and what you can do is ask them questions:
Why do you say what you’re saying?
What are you hoping to achieve?
Did you know that what you’re saying
could actually lead
to people getting hurt?
What kind of world do you
want to leave your children?
These kinds of questions unpack
people’s motivations
and interestingly, it helps them open up,
but also helps you understand them better.
What you often realize
is that people aren’t just haters,
but they’re coming from a position
of trying to protect their “in” group,
and then by doing that, sometimes
they’re saying hateful things
about those who think might threaten
their “in” group or their way of life.
And if you try to kind of get
into conversations at this level,
this level of motivation,
then you can often find common ground.
One quote that’s really wonderful
from Martin Luther King talked about this.
It says: “Darkness cannot drive
out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate;
only love can do that.”
Remember that next time you respond
to someone who says a hateful comment.
Try to engage with them
in a positive, constructive way.
Lesson number four.
Now, lesson number five
brings together all four of these lessons
and applies them to an online forum.
So when we’re on an online forum
when there’s hate,
there’s often people
that have other people supporting them.
So what you can do by going in there
and challenging this in a respectful way
is to essentially
try to change the online norm -
what’s acceptable and unacceptable
online in that forum?
And by trying to change the online norm,
you can get other people to join you
who might be standing back watching.
Others might have
like-minded views as yours,
but there may be reluctant to get in,
but when they see you step in,
they will also get in,
and this creates a kind of herding
effect where others will join,
and over time, you can change
the online norm.
And another effect this can have
is that it can make those
who are espousing hate step back, right?
There’s this other idea called
“the spiral of silence,”
which is how people feel
when they have unpopular views.
They usually don’t want to espouse them
because of the social
isolation they encounter.
So that can happen online as well.
People, if they see lots of people
challenging their hateful views,
will often step back and not engage,
and then you can start to change
the norms in that forum.
The most important people
that you can affect
are those who are vulnerable,
those who have certain grievances
that are similar to those
that are espousing hate
but haven’t committed
to a hateful ideology yet.
You can try to influence those people,
and some of them
are young, impressionable youth.
If you can get them
before they establish their positions,
then you can move them
in a direction away from hate.
OK, let’s recap those five lessons.
Do you remember what they are?
Lesson number one: Reframe the argument.
Remember, dehumanization
involves negative collectivization;
rehumanization involves
positive individualization.
Lesson number two: Challenge hypocrisy,
which is often irrational,
by challenging how people view
their group with other groups.
This can help drop collective blame.
Lesson number three:
Communicate with credibility.
Lesson number four: Be nice.
Engage in constructive dialogue.
And lesson number five:
Work with others to change
the online norm away from hate.
En route to a better world,
overcoming hate and prejudice
will be one of the greatest
challenges of this century.
However, with online tools,
they also bring a lot of opportunities
that we can tap into.
Remember this because we ultimately
have to share this one planet,
and it’s increasingly important
not to see the world as us and them,
but to see us all as one human family.
Thank you very much for listening.