@article{2020:keller:combatting,
title = {Combatting hate and trolling with love and reason? A qualitative analysis of the discursive antagonisms between organized hate speech and counterspeech online},
year = {2020},
note = {An increasingly organized culture of hate is flourishing in today’s
online spaces, posing a serious challenge for democratic societies.
Our study seeks to unravel the workings of online hate on popular
social media and assess the practices, potentialities, and limitations
of organized counterspeech to stymie the spread of hate online. This
article is based on a case study of an organized “troll army” of
online hate speech in Germany, Reconquista Germanica, and the
counterspeech initiative Reconquista Internet. Conducting a
qualitative content analysis, we first unpack the strategies and
stated intentions behind organized hate speech and counterspeech
groups as articulated in their internal strategic documents. We then
explore how and to what extent such strategies take shape in online
media practices, focusing on the interplay between users spreading
hate and users counterspeaking in the comment sections of German news
articles on Facebook. The analysis draws on a multi-dimensional
framework for studying social media engagement (Uldam & Kaun, 2019)
with a focus on practices and discourses and turns to Mouffe’s
(2005) concepts of political antagonism and agonism to operationalize
and deepen the discursive dimension. The study shows that the
interactions between the two opposing camps are highly moralized,
reflecting a post-political antagonistic battle between “good” and
“evil” and showing limited signs of the potentials of
counterspeech to foster productive agonism. The empirical data
indicates that despite the promising intentions of rule-guided
counterspeech, the counter efforts identified and scrutinized in this
study predominantly fail to adhere to civic and moral standards and
thus only spur on the destructive dynamics of digital hate culture.},
journal = {SCM Studies in Communication and Media},
pages = {540--572},
author = {Keller, Nadine and Askanius, Tina},
volume = {9},
number = {4}
}