The organization ‘Common Sense Education’ talked to young people about hate speech. In these conversations, young people raised burning issues and also sensible solutions.

How do young people define hate-speech?

In Common Sense Education interviews, young people said that hate speech is any message that is threatening or meant to hurt someone because of their beliefs, who they are, what they look like, or who they love. According to them, hate speech means using your words to oppress or harm someone else. One young person said, “When what they are saying is marginalizing or hurting a whole community, not just being offensive to one person, that’s not just you being mean, that’s hate speech.”

In these interviews, all of the incidents of hate speech that young people experienced happened on social media platforms. One of them said that “ableism, race, religion, sexism, [are] on all online platform’s comment sections, you don’t have to try very hard to find it.”It seemed from their descriptions, that hate speech is a normal part of social media.

The rise of digital information technologies has changed the ways that people communicate. Information now moves faster and more easily than ever before. And the rate at which humanity is adopting digital communication is astounding. Six in every ten people around the world are online (that’s 4.72 billion people). The rate of internet usage has doubled in less than ten years. In places like India, more people have access to smartphones than to a flushing toilet. These innovations, however, have also been adopted by extremists and hateful groups, who have amplified and accelerated the spread of hate speech. Hate speech is on the rise, and it has found a fertile environment in social media. To make matters worse, society’s existing divisions (around ethnicity, religion, race, gender, and class) and the COVID-19 pandemic have worsened the spread of hateful and violent messages online.

How does hate speech affect young people?

The young people who were interviewed by Common Sense Education said that hate speech affects them in a variety of ways. Many feel angry and argue with the people who publish hateful posts. Others feel a sense of helplessness; they see hate speech everywhere and feel like there is nothing they can do about it. Most of them try to ignore it. Another big issue that young people voiced was that hate speech online makes their peers distrustful. Many reported that hateful accounts were created by their classmates. In these cases, schools became spaces where students felt fear instead of safety. Young people concluded that, ”online, people can say what they want and get away with it.”

In South East Asia, young people spend 60% of their waking life online, more than the global average. And social media platforms are the most common source of usage.

So, the majority of the population in South East Asia is spending extended periods of time on social media, slowly normalizing the presence of hate and incitement online.

People are significantly shaped by what they experience during their youth. During this time, people’s brains undergo a process that in many ways defines their adult mindset. During our youth, we are particularly impressionable, we are more likely to make rash reactions to external stimuli, and we have an outstanding ability to learn and adapt. We are able to develop deeper critical thinking and problem-solving skills. And our brains define their default structure; from the millions of neurological pathways created during childhood, the least used are dissolved while those which are most used are reinforced. The generation of youth today, which is also the largest generation of youth in history, spends extended periods of time online, exposed to streams of hate-speech on all platforms on a regular basis.

So, youth are affected in many ways by hate speech. Some impacts of rising hate speech are experienced by youth on a daily basis. However, longer-term consequences of regular exposure to hate-speech online are not yet known, and are therefore worrisome. This is particularly vexing when one considers that the normalization of hate speech has been a precursor to many human-made calamities.

What can we do about it?

The young people interviewed by Common Sense Education expressed distress about the rise of hate speech, but they also voiced solutions to curb the rise in hate:

“When I see something on my timeline, I go out of my way to report it”

“I feel a sort of social responsibility, we all should be lifting each other up, rather than putting each other down.”

To stop hate speech, you too should go out of your way to report it. Every social media platform has its own reporting mechanism. Once you report, employees at these companies will review flagged posts and take the posts down if they violate their hate speech guidelines.

Another useful resource for reporting incidents of hate speech, particularly in Malaysia and Burma/Myanmar, is the app SOS Hate. With SOS Hate, not only can you report incidents of hate speech, you can also learn about different remedies and legal provisions to combat hate speech.

We need to demonstrate to the upcoming generation that people can’t get away with inciting violence and oppression against vulnerable populations. As the young people in Common Sense Education said, we all have a social responsibility to lift each other up and prevent the rise of hate speech.