Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a quantitative and qualitative synthesis of the diverse academic proposals and initiatives for preventing and eliminating hate speech on the internet. Design/methodology/approach The foundation for this study is a systematic review of papers devoted to the analysis of hate speech. It has been conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol and applied to an initial corpus of 436 academic texts. Having implemented the suitability, screening and (...) inclusion criteria, this corpus was refined to a sample of 74 articles. Findings The main subject categories studied in this corpus of academic research are legal issues and social media. In the majority of the articles, the use of hate speech via social media is associated with five typologies: religion, cyber racism, political slurs, misogyny and attacks on the LGTBI community. The absence of ethical reflection is one of the major shortcomings of IT-focused research and analysis devoted to online hate speech. Practical implications To date various systematic reviews have been presented, and they focus on detecting or describing hate speech. These have used either the search appraisal synthesis analysis framework or the Cochrane network. The PRISMA protocol was applied for this study, and both Scopus and texts in German were included. To date no major, rigorous systematic review has been undertaken of proposals to combat hate speech. Originality/value The link between hate speech and poverty has not been studied in depth within the academic sphere. Tolerance and ethical compassion are not granted the attention they merit when it comes to analysing the phenomenon of hate speech. (shrink)

Abstract‘Counterspeech’ is often presented as a way in which individual citizens can respond to harmful speech while avoiding the potentially coercive and freedom-damaging effects of formal speech restrictions. But counterspeech itself can also undermine freedom by contributing to forms of social punishment that manipulate a speaker’s choice set in uncontrolled ways. Specifically, and by adopting a republican perspective, this paper argues that certain kinds of counterspeech candominatewhen they contribute to unchecked social norms that enable others to interfere arbitrarily with speakers. (...) The presence of such domination can pose just as much a threat to freedom of speech as unchecked formal restrictions by threatening an individual’s discursive status, revealing a problem for those who defend counterspeech as a freedom-protecting alternative. Rather than rejecting both counterspeech and legislation outright, however, this paper argues that the republican principle ofparsimonyought to be exercised when deciding on appropriate harmful speech response. While the principle of parsimony allows for suitably-checked formal punishment for some of the most egregious forms of harmful speech, citizen-led counterspeech must be guided by a reliable set of norms against the use of social punishment where those who do engage in social punishment face certain costs. The presence of robust, widely-known, and reliable norms thus supports both formal and informal responses to harmful speech while maintaining a secure discursive status for all. (shrink)