How Social Media Hate Has Widespread And Normalized Today?

The rise of social media has helped magnify hate speech with pulling in people into it.

Namaste.

We do not have to guess anymore about the extent of hate that has spread to the heart of our society. The epidemic of hate can be seen almost everywhere - in our homes, educational institutions and workplaces, on social media, on television and in films, on roads and other transport places, in religious gatherings and political meetings. The content generated by the hateful users tend to spread faster, farther and reach a much wider audience as compared to the content generated by normal users, making it more difficult to identify the source.

Social media is a golden platform for connecting people and allowing them to network, share news and air their personal opinions. Besides, it hosts alarming degrees of hatred directed at individuals and groups, threatening victims' psychological and physical well-being. It has some group of people who are probably brain-dead but calls themselves as sigma personalities, and they're job is to spread hate around. By collaborating with other like-minded culprits, who offer validation and support, they're showing their antipathy towards the targets. Shielding their faces behind the screens, the lengths those sort of people go are sickening. It seemed like they're not grown their brain cells and continue to be inhuman with zero heed of politeness and common sense in public mediums.

As mentioned by NCRB India, there's been an increase of 45% in cases pertaining to hate speech and other related acts in the past two years. However, there is a potential to have significantly more cites that aren't emerged to the public.

Who are mainly accountable and why?

There are a few citizens of society who're far more likely to be:

Attention seekers. All they need is ATTENTION! They will go to any extent for the profound need for validation and recognition as they believe their controversial actions will garner more reach. Above all, political campaigns, are exclusive reasons to cause polarization among people in order to get attention for their political advantages.

Narcissists. They perceive themselves as sigma/alpha personalities (but actually cringers)🗿, who can do or talk anything with anyone. By inciting strong emotions and provocative reactions, they feel a sense of dominance and superiority from the people.

Celebrity worshipers. They're the reason for the so-called Internet fan wars. Their favorite is the best and they cant show minimal respect on others. Taking the people for granted, no spark of decency is carried out with them. Whoever their target, they just focus on abusing them or their families, even assaulting them for god's sake. Many arguments over hate speech escalate into flame wars, where most commenters may not even remember what they were originally debating about, but rather resort to personal attacks and sometimes even threats. Irony is that with heights of antagonism, they even show the vitriolic behavior on their favorites and bully them as well. There's also someone who do these out of boredom/jealousy in pursuit of pleasure by physically or emotionally harming another person.

Toxic citizens. They are everywhere! All they do is taking down people at any cost. Abusing with race, ethnicity, religion, gender, skin color, social status, sexual orientation etc., are their things. If someone responds to those abuse, they were called a snowflake. Slut shaming women by character assassination, and calling them with cuss words are recurrent in social media. Some say they respect women and few hours later there is a comment from them for a random post on Internet, about swearing a woman or cursing someone's mother. That's how they are!! Some pass generalized statements like, "I hate feminists." Okay, but why?? Even they don't have a valid answer.

Memers. These days memes are well liked and are not only sources of amusement and entertainment, but can also strengthen the social connections. However, that was changed with trolling. Humorous hate speech contributing to the normalization of hatred, by targeting individuals or groups, including verbal or visual manifestations of bigotry. Although most people use memes without malicious intent, it has become increasingly common for extremist political groups or other ill-minded people to hijack memes in order to propagate misinformation and promote hateful ideologies.

Flippers. They are the most underrated, and can take any side at anytime. They just want to be in dominant side and prove the other one wrong, so they flip the words whenever they need and start executing bigotry.

It's important to emphasize that these actions are not justified or acceptable as they undoubtedly cause severe trauma to the victims. To truly prevent incidents of hate speech online, there is a need for a massive campaign that sensitizes people towards media consumption and helps them differentiate between free speech and hate speech.

Mastering control measures for hatred in social media is everyone's duty and one should know what they are;