1 Abstract Thesis title: Hate speech throughout the continents The aim of this thesis is to shed light on standings and rulings of the United States Supreme Court and the European Court of Human rights in hate speech cases. It defines the term "hate speech" and presents grounds used for its restrictions when it comes to freedom of expression. Through introducing established principles that govern the decision-making of both courts and analysing them in key judgments on both continents, the author is trying to determine possible alterations that may lead to enhancing the protection given by hate speech case-law. The author also analyses historical and social impact on the case-law of both the Supreme Court and the ECHR and finds that this influence has led to establishment of crucial principles without which the hate speech cases could hardly be decided today. Both historical and social factors lead the author to the conclusion that the protection against hate speech could still use a tune-up. In author's point of view, the Supreme Court should ease the grip on the First Amendment and give the "true threats" principle, established in Virginia v. Black, leave to prohibit not only intimidating expressions but harmful expressions as well - both physical and mental. The Supreme Court should also strengthen the...

Freedom of Expression in the Czech Republic This master thesis deals with freedom of expression in the Czech Republic while focusing on the issues of hate speech. It is not only Czech legal code this thesis takes into consideration, because there is an inspiration coming from foreign decisions as well. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter explains the term "freedom of expression": it deals with the terminology of "right" and "freedom", categorizes it into the hierarchy of other rights and elaborates the aspects in which freedom of expression is included. This chapter also deals with the arguments supporting freedom of expression. The second chapter describes how freedom of expression is regulated in the Czech legal code. It briefly summarises the evolution, then it deals with individual legal acts: Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms and the international conventions (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms). An idea is also put forward: Does restricting freedom of expression imply the restriction of freedom of thought? The third chapter deals with the restrictions, with the relation between Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms and the...

The aim of this master thesis is to compare the activities of nongovernmental organisations working with the topic of hate speech in the Czech Republic and in Hungary in relation to the target group. In the thesis, three questions have been answered according to the results of the analysis done in the master thesis: Are the nongovernmental organisations in the Czech Republic and in Hungary working with the same kinds of hate speech in their project activities? Are the nongovernmental organisations in the Czech Republic and in Hungary focused on the same target group in their activities? Are the nongovernmental organisations in the Czech Republic and in Hungary active in the same environments during the project realisation? The methods that have been used in the thesis are description and comparative analysis.

Hate speech in South Africa creates a tension between the right to freedom of expression and the rights to human dignity and equality. The challenge is to achieve a balance between these competing rights in the context of the divisive past and the transformative constitutional ideal, in which reconciliation and respect for group difference are promoted. Freedom of expression, an individual right, must be construed in light of its underlying values, but regard must also be given to communitarian interests. The constitutional standard draws the initial line. The advocacy of hatred on four grounds and which constitutes incitement to cause harm is not constitutionally protected speech. Such speech undermines nation building, causes acrimony, and is not tolerated in the egalitarian society envisaged by the Constitution. The thesis formulates a principled legislative hate speech framework for South Africa at both human rights and criminal levels within the parameters of the constitutional mandate, as guided by the standard for hate speech restrictions in international law, and the Canadian regulatory model. An essential premise is that regulation requires a multi-faceted balancing enquiry. A holistic approach is proposed where factors such as respect for the dignity of the victims, autonomy for speakers, listeners and the wider community; the causal link between hate speech and hatred in a community; and the desire to achieve a diverse and harmonious society; amongst others, are considered. Failure to regulate hate speech constructively endorses hatemongers and promotes damaging speech at the expense of vulnerable groups. Regulation ensures that law sets the normative benchmark, affirms the protection of vulnerable groups within the social fabric and upholds social cohesion, inclusiveness and the equal citizenship of all individuals in society. The thesis contains a proposal for the enactment of legislation creating a self-standing hate speech crime for the advocacy of extreme hatred, shaped in accordance with international requirements and comparative foreign law, and structured in light of the distinction between hate crime and hate speech. The existing legal framework is unable to provide consistent and fitting redress for the severe harm caused by such speech, namely the fostering of an environment in which the stigmatisation of groups is promoted, their exclusion from society justified and intervention is needed to remedy the escalated levels of hatred and violence between different groups in society. PEPUDA, a remedial statute aimed at promoting transformation and substantive equality, is valuable, but its speech prohibitions are broad and imprecise. Consequently, their effectiveness is compromised and their constitutionality questioned. The thesis proposes recommendations for amendments to sections 7(a), 10(1) and 12 of PEPUDA. The aim is to ensure compliance with the international standard and to foster the optimal regulation of hate speech and other forms of damaging speech, including derogatory racial epithets, which undermine human dignity and equality and threaten national unity. It is intended for the two systems to complement one another and to create a legal framework aimed at addressing hate speech constructively and in context, promoting tolerance, respect for difference, reconciliation and transformation.

This dissertation is a critical discourse analysis of how anti-Islamic rhetoric in prominent online forums is articulated within the context of popular discourses of multiculturalism and tolerance. According to Melanie McAlister, perceptions of Muslims within the United States are unique in comparison to other minority groups in that they are almost entirely mediated, whether it is the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the terrorist attacks of September 11th, or the various Muhammad cartoon controversies. While much work has been done analyzing how Islam and Muslims are mediated in popular film and television, very little attention has been given to how these perspectives are mediated through the Internet. Using Erving Goffman's theory of performativity and Kristine Fitch's notion of persuadables, I examine how both prominent bloggers and pseudonymous commentators work in a "back stage" context to bring Islamophobic norms and premises within the sphere of acceptable opinions for the "front stage" of mainstream media discourses. In particular, I examine how these discourses have evolved over the past few years on three prominent weblogs: the anti-jihadist Little Green Footballs, the liberal-atheist advocacy blog One Good Move, and the popular news aggregate Fark. In light of increasing evidence that weblogs exert a high level of influence over popular media discourses disproportionate to their readership, these websites offer a glimpse "back stage" into how contemporary American discourses on Islam and Muslims are articulated across a broad array of political perspectives, particularly in relation to norms and premises regarding multiculturalism, tolerance, and freedom of expression. While Islamophobic rhetoric has become firmly embedded within discourses of the American Right, each of the three sites examined show a steady integration of anti-Islamic perspectives within the American Left. Leftist anti-Islamic discourses are frequently articulated within the context of general anti-religious sentiment, misanthropy, and a belief that the values of "the Islamic world" are inherently incompatible with the liberal, democratic, and multicultural values of "the West." While by no means universal, these perspectives have become sufficiently common, recognizable, and sensible to be granted the status of persuadables within these particular web forums, which in turn helps to move them into the realm of popular American cultural persuadables.

The issue of so called hate speech in the context of freedom of speech Abstract This thesis titled The issue of so-called hate speech in the context of freedom of speech deals with the legal regulation of hate speech at the international and national level. The thesis contains a comprehensive analysis of legal instruments regulating hate speech in civil, anti-discrimination, administrative and criminal law. This thesis combines the theoretical basis of hate speech regulation with practical knowledge about the applicability of individual legal norms and is supplemented by relevant case law of the Czech courts and the European Court of Human Rights. The aim of this work is to describe the phenomenon of hate speech, provide an analysis of legal instruments regulating hate speech and also to analyse legal arguments for hate speech regulation. The thesis attempts to find the boundary between protected speech and speech that is unprotected by the international and constitutional framework of freedom of speech protection, by means of an analysis of individual court decisions. The thesis also contains a critical reflection of the current legal framework of hate speech regulation and suggests possible variants of legislative changes in the future. The thesis is structured into five chapters. The first part...

no / Verbal-textual hostility plays a significant role in victims¿ subjective perceptions of hatred and police officers¿ assessment of a hate crime. Yet, to date, the role of hate speech in hate crime has been largely uninterrogated. The aim of this research project is to assess and evaluate the forensic possibilities contained in a closer reading of the words used in hate crimes. Through a critical discourse analysis of incident characteristics and officers¿ narratives of incidents, this report maps out how key hate speech-text indicators may assist to better evaluate the force and effects of hate crimes. It is expected that this type of contextual analysis will lead to the development of more sophisticated risk assessment tools for use in frontline policing, and more targeted service-enhancements for victims of hate crimes.

Hateful content and offensive language are commonplace on social media platforms. Many surveys prove that high percentages of social media users experience online harassment. Previous efforts have been made to detect and remove online hate content automatically. However, removing users' content restricts free speech. A complementary strategy to address hateful content that does not interfere with free speech is to counter the hate with new content to divert the discourse away from the hate. In this dissertation, we complement the lack of previous work on counterhate arguments by analyzing and detecting them. Firstly, we study the relationships between hateful tweets and replies. Specifically, we analyze their fine-grained relationships by indicating whether the reply counters the hate, provides a justification, attacks the author of the tweet, or adds additional hate. The most obvious finding is that most replies generally agree with the hateful tweets; only 20% of them counter the hate. Secondly, we focus on the hate directed toward individuals and detect authentic counterhate arguments from online articles. We propose a methodology that assures the authenticity of the argument and its specificity to the individual of interest. We show that finding arguments in online articles is an efficient alternative compared to counterhate generation approaches that may hallucinate unsupported arguments. Thirdly, we investigate the replies to counterhate tweets beyond whether the reply agrees or disagrees with the counterhate tweet. We analyze the language of the counterhate tweet that leads to certain types of replies and predict which counterhate tweets may elicit more hate instead of stopping it. We find that counterhate tweets with profanity content elicit replies that agree with the counterhate tweet. This dissertation presents several corpora, detailed corpus analyses, and deep learning-based approaches for the three tasks mentioned above.

Social media is considered a particularly conducive arena for hate speech. Counter speech, which is a "direct response that counters hate speech" is a remedy to address hate speech. Unlike content moderation, counter speech does not interfere with the principle of free and open public spaces for debate. This dissertation focuses on the (a) automatic detection and (b) analyses of the effectiveness of counter speech and its fine-grained strategies in user-generated web content. The first goal is to identify counter speech. We create a corpus with 6,846 instances through crowdsourcing. We specifically investigate the role of conversational context in the annotation and detection of counter speech. The second goal is to assess and predict conversational outcomes of counter speech. We propose a new metric to measure conversation incivility based on the number of uncivil and civil comments as well as the unique authors involved in the discourse. We then use the metric to evaluate the outcomes of replies to hate speech. The third goal is to establish a fine-grained taxonomy of counter speech. We present a theoretically grounded taxonomy that differentiates counter speech addressing the author of hate speech from addressing the content. We further compare the conversational outcomes of different types of counter speech and build models to identify each type. We conclude by discussing our contributions and future research directions on using user-generated counter speech to combat online hatred.

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