Hate speech in online reactions to news articles in Cyprus and Greece

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Several recent events, such the ongoing migration crisis in the Mediterranean or the legalisation of same sex civil unions across a number of western countries, have brought to the global limelight discussions surrounding the notion of hate speech and the extent to which it should be regulated by law. A central issue affecting these discussions seems to be the elusiveness of the very notion of hate speech itself, which lacks a harmonised definition across different discursive settings. This is true even in its prototypical legal setting, since different countries have varying thresholds for what actually constitutes prosecutable hate speech (cf. Boromisza-Habashi 2013, Brown 2015). In addition to this, even if one takes on board the simplified view that some piece of discourse legally qualifies as hate speech if it incites to violence and discrimination towards some identifiable minority group (cf. Brown 2015), the very existence of hate speech laws in the first place can be seen to have affected the ways in which people opt to communicate discriminatory attitudes, often concealing them behind seemingly harmless statements. [Excerpt]