Introduction:
In recent years, with the fast development of internet, social media has woven into people’s daily lives. It provides an open space for people to interact socially and is fast becoming a core component of public discourse forums. However, the pitfalls posed by social media are also becoming apparent. As people’s freedom to communicate and express their opinions on social media has been amplified the rapid spread of hate speech on social media has raised concerns. This essay explores the intricate dynamics of social media particularly that have led to the spread of hate speech and examines potential ways to mitigate these issues.
Hate speech on the internet is defined as any communication that demeans an individual or group on the basis of characteristics such as race, color, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion or political affiliation. The consequences of the prevalence of hate speech on social media platforms include fostering discrimination and hostility towards different groups by creating an environment of prejudice and intolerance and, in serious cases, fueling offline violence from the harm caused by online speech. As women are generally more vulnerable to sexism as the more vulnerable party, the prevalence of sexist hate speech on social media not only spreads gender stereotypes but also quietly changes the nature of communication on Internet platforms. Social deviance can explain the origin of cyberhate, a term that encompasses all behaviors, ranging from minor violations of norms to offences against others, and considers online hate as a transgressive communicative behavior because he violates common cultural standards, rules or norms of social interaction in the context of social groups. With the emergence of social platforms, people fully enjoy the right to freedom of expression, which is necessary for the preservation of the democratic rights of each individual, helps each person to achieve self-fulfillment, to discover the truth and to strengthen themselves, to create an acceptable balance between social stability and change, and which also allows each person to create their own beliefs and to communicate freely with others. However, as social platforms, their main purpose is to make profit, and when people’s speech tends to be harmonious resulting in low user activity, some platforms deliberately give more exposure to accounts posting hate speech to lead users to argue with each other in order to increase the platform’s user activity. After a social event is triggered, the platform quickly emerges a large number of hate speech against a certain group of people in the event, causing a large number of discussions on the event, the platform will carry out an intervention phase, during which the hate speech will gradually decrease until it gradually tends to zero, and then it will reappear after a long period of time. This also just goes to show that the state of excitement about hate speech is to some extent manipulated by the platforms.
Hate Speech and its Impact on Women
Accusations against women are everywhere on social media platforms, and with the secondary dissemination of personal accounts, women are invariably categorised as a source of evil and implicitly objectified. With the rise of feminism and the affirmative action movement in recent years, the situation of women on the internet is gradually being re-examined. What cannot be ignored is that in this day and age, when it comes to reports of corrupt practices, one always sees the argument that women are viewed as the bane that lures men to commit crimes, which is undoubtedly an unfair moral standard imposed on women. And when a woman is elected to office, it is often easier for people to make remarks about her gender identity, thereby ignoring her abilities and endeavors. On the one hand, the image of women conveyed by the mass media is often irrational, and to this day, female drivers are still portrayed as roadkill, and female drivers involved in accidents are still subjected to a great deal of criticism on the Internet. On the other hand, women are portrayed as image of childish and ignorant pets.
Once a woman ventures into a field on the Internet where there are usually more male users, she is mobbed by male users, thus proving that she is not really into the field but is just trying to gain attention. The most notable example to illustrate is during the league of legends World Championship Season 13 last year, Douyin, which is China’s Tiktok, has a large number of users to launch support on the lpl regional teams hope they achieve good results, one of the female users in the form of dance support team JDG, however, her comment section was subjected to a large number of attacks, the majority of these attacks on the male identified that she does not understand the league of Legends as a game, but only to see the current jittery voice Most of the men who attacked her concluded that she did not know about the game, but only saw the League of Legends World Series on the current Douyin Hotlist, and participated in it, with the main purpose of gaining views and attention by participating in the topic. In addition, the female user’s videos consisted of a hand gesture dance with cheering text, a format that users who accused her of disrespecting their favorite game. However, the female user is actually a host in the lpl region and has already conducted interviews with members of team JDG, who has work in the field of game for quite a long time. She was introduced to the game League of Legends before most of the male users who accused her of it.
In addition to the obviously emotional hate speech, more hate speech was delivered in a condescending, downward looking manner, which was also present in her comment section, where some would ask questions about, for example, the League of Legends tournament format, the members of the team, and the development process to make sure that she wasn’t really a fan of the followers. These questions full of malice and stares represent their own belief that women won’t be into gaming, sports, areas that usually interest most men. This kind of trap that ask women to prove that they have enough “knowledge” to the field which male take the lead is ubiquitous on social media, apart from eSports, even some female users posting about their car purchases have attracted a mob of some male users accusing her of not knowing how the car performs. Some male users hate women to the extent that they can’t believe that a single woman can buy a car on her own, so they spread rumors on social media platforms that women sell their bodies for material things, forcing female users to call the police to solve the problems, and affecting women’s lives offline through this hate speech online. However, within the group of men users who attack women, there are also a large number of them who only follow gaming and sports when it comes to the big events. These male users even go so far as to educate women who have always been put emphasis on these fields to think that even if they have knowledge all the time, it’s not as good as their innate knowing of being born male. What is even more frightening is that modern social media has the ability to manipulate people’s emotions, and when the extreme hatred of women, which originally occupied a small part of our lives, is propagated and influences most people’s views on things, and the criterion for evaluating something is simply defined as the fact that the person who made the decision is a woman, the hostility between each other on the internet is brought into real life and breaks the original harmony, the impact on people’s lives is undoubtedly huge. The impact on people’s lives is undoubtedly huge. It’s very sad that some people are so brainwashed by hate speech against women on the internet that they attack their female friends, relatives, and even their mothers in their lives.
Challenges and Strategies of Governance:
Managing the spread of hate speech against women on platforms is quite a challenge. First of all, as a profit-oriented platform with indicators of user activity, many social media websites can gain lots of discussion with the rise of feminism especially when gender issue has raised the public’s attention, and the endless debates are a source of profit for the platforms. As a result, some platforms tacitly allow or even cultivate accounts to post controversial comments, which are known as internet water army, and some of these artificial intelligence may imitate real man’s tone post content contains hate speech against women to attract women users, and even some of the content to argue the hate speech are also from robots, which is a pity that the trouble of women is seemed as a way to make profit. According to the report, the Chinese government’s activity on governance the internet has shut down 39,379 machine internet water army accounts on Weibo, 633 internet water army recruiting accounts, and 569 malicious real-life accounts that deliberately post hate speech online, so it’s important to see how platforms can make the trade-off between profit and maintaining public order.
In fact, this approach can only bring a momentary heat to the platform, if let hate speech spread on the platform, the hostility of the platform will gradually increase, and users can not feel the pleasure of using the platform but will lose users. For example, Baidu Tieba, once as China’s largest forum, once for people with different hobbies to provide a platform so that they can communicate with each other, but in the prevalence of hate speech against women, a large number of female users lost, and subsequently the male users are gradually disappearing, so that Baidu posting bar from its heyday in 2015 the total number of registered users of one billion, with a monthly active user of more than three hundred million, posting bar a total of ten million topics! By 2021 only 37.43 million active users will remain. In these days, with Baidu Tieba ‘s indulgence in hate speech against women, the public is gradually labelling the platform as a place where full of male losers and incels, which also affects the evaluation of the platform itself. The role of platform governance in the dissemination of hate speech in extending the life of platforms. In the face of the spread of hate speech against women on the Internet, platforms undoubtedly bear a great responsibility. As agenda-setters and opinion-formers, the mass media should play their part in eliminating stereotypical images of women and presenting a new image of women. Firstly, they should step up their regulatory efforts, and platforms should set up separate departments to regulate gender-related speech on social media platforms, and endeavor to guide users to discuss in a rational manner. Secondly, they should punish marketing numbers that maliciously provoke gender conflicts and publish sexist and hateful speech to incite users’ emotions. In addition, the relevant state departments should strengthen gender awareness education for media practitioners in addition to professional ethics education, and for the new media platforms based on the Internet, they should improve the monitoring system of media women’s portrayal, and allow women’s organizations such as the Women’s Federation to join in as members of the monitoring, so as to form a whole set of women’s media monitoring network, and to deal with the phenomena of sexism and gender hate speech in social media with a zero-tolerance stance. The phenomenon of gender discrimination and gender hate speech in social media should be addressed with no tolerance.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, with the development of the times and the enhancement of the subjective consciousness of the female audience, more and more female users want to overthrow the stereotypes of the former women through social media, which will undoubtedly incur the attack of the patriarchal society of male-oriented ideas of more hate speech. However, social media platforms can reduce the publication of hate speech by strengthening content auditing, and by enhancing user feedback and applying it to algorithms to improve the algorithmic regulation of hate speech, so that rational discussion can cover up the deliberate dissemination of hate speech against women, so that such hate speech loses its popularity and viewership, and marketing organizations can no longer make profits from it and gradually give up disseminating it. It is also possible to increase the proportion of women in the platform’s regulatory system to create an atmosphere which is friendly to women.
Reference：
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