This review addresses the ongoing challenges faced by legislators and digital platforms in defining and regulating hate speech online.
Despite increased attention to the issue, questions surrounding the definition of hate speech remain unresolved, raising concerns about both theoretical clarity and practical applicability. For this reason, the paper focuses on three central questions: the main challenges involved in defining hate speech, the possible alternatives to existing definitions, and the relationship between the scope of a definition and its operationalization in online contexts.
By tracing regulatory and definitional efforts across legal, paralegal, and technology platform settings, the review identifies four main modes of defining hate speech: teleological, pure consequentialist, formal, and consensus or relativist approaches.
The authors highlight that, although hate speech has long been the focus of legal and ethical debate, both its theoretical definition and its regulation remain elusive. Existing definitions are often vague or internally inconsistent, with no universally accepted framework emerging from legal theory, jurisprudence, or academic research. This lack of consensus is further complicated by new ethical and communicative challenges posed by digital and social media environments.
Learn more about this review here: https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599221124309
Reference
Hietanen, M., & Eddebo, J. (2022). Towards a Definition of Hate Speech—With a Focus on Online Contexts. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 47(4), 440-458