Cherian George is a Professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University School of Communication, where he is also the Director of the Centre for Media and Communication Research. His research focuses on freedom of expression in public life, particularly its intersections with media freedom, censorship, religious intolerance, and hateful propaganda. He is the author of several books, including Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and Its Threat to Democracy and Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle Against Censorship.
In this interview, George shares his insights on why he coined the term “hate spin,” the need for a multi-pronged approach to combat offline and online hate, and the importance of open communication and offline community building to effectively fight rising polarization.
Deeksha Udupa: What is the role of the state in combating polarizing disinformation, violence, and hateful content?
Cherian George: We are, unfortunately, in an era where violence and hate crime is a much more important issue than hate speech. When you think about the amount of attention that hate speech gets—especially in Western media and discourse—there is an assumption that if we do not counter hate speech, bad things will happen. These bad things would be in the form of discrimination, violence, and so on. With this assumption, we should only be interested in hate speech because of its impact beyond the symbolic violence. Hate speech, of course, can itself be intimidating, but its most serious outcome, as recognized in American and European law, is the incitement of violence.
In other parts of the world and particularly in India, however, you have to wonder why we are focusing on hateful speech when the real and biggest issue is hateful action. There’s relatively little attention on hate crimes. If we talk about the problem in South Asia, the issue is actual violence.
I raise this because when we think about the role of the state, we must not forget that the basic function of any state is to protect its citizens from actual violence. There are tons of philosophical discussions that can be had about the line between free speech and hate speech, but we also must remember that all of this philosophizing is occurring as actual lives are being lost. So, if you want to talk about the role of the state, the primary purpose of the state is to protect citizens from actual violence, and that is not happening in many places. It is only after acknowledging this that we can ask where does this violence comes from and what is the role of the state in regulating this kind of speech that can, and often does, lead to violence.
In a country like India, I find the debate about hate speech to be second order. This debate is very relevant in societies where the level of violence is not that extreme. In these societies, the central challenge is intervening in the area of speech to ensure that the speech does not transform into violence. But in a society like India’s, how do better hate speech laws help when you’ve got impunity for actual crimes? The real challenge is maintaining the rule of law so that mass murders, rapes, and lynchings are actually punished. Ending this culture of impunity would have a far greater impact than attempting to tweak hate speech laws in India.
DU: What is the next step if the state is not doing its bare minimum to protect all of its citizens?
CG: If it reaches the levels that are seen in India and the degrees of high-level complicity on the part of the ruling party, then we are dealing with a rogue state. Thus, we must look to international systems and the pressures that they can enforce. We must not use India’s position as a counterweight to China to justify the Indian state’s disregard for human rights. Countries that claim to have some interest in a rules-based order and human rights need to treat India as the regime that it is rather than celebrating it as a pillar of democracy in the world.
DU: Why do you consider India to be the most alarming example of hate spin?
CG: It’s very simple—India is the most alarming example of hate spin because it is no longer something on the fringe. It is a state project. In the American context, for example, you’ve got sympathizers of white nationalism within the Republican party and in the White House. Yet it would still be a stretch to say that white nationalism is what the current American regime is all about. By contrast, there is a deliberate and strategic objective in India, with decades of ideological work and systematic effort, to change the structure of Indian democracy into an ethno-nationalist state.
You also must consider the sheer size of India. Regardless of how India defines itself as the world’s largest democracy, it is an electoral autocracy. And considering its size, when bad things happen in India, it affects an incredibly high number of people.
DU: Why do you prefer the term “hate spin” over “hate speech”?
CG: When I coined the term “hate spin,” I felt that the prevailing understandings of hate speech were predominantly focused on explicit calls to commit harm to target groups. Yet what I was seeing around the world was also how hate actors deployed a completely different rhetoric through which they portrayed themselves as victims. These hate actors claimed to be targets for offensive attacks and speech, but there seemed to be a lack of vocabulary to describe that.
I coined the term “hate spin” to capture this two-sided character of modern hate campaigns. The degrees by which hate spin occurs vary. In societies where social norms and legal restrictions are such that conventional hate speech is not a viable political option for mainstream politicians, they tend to deploy the deliberate manufactured indignation. The law generally has a hard time dealing with that because it doesn’t sound like conventional incitement. In societies where there is impunity for conventional hate speech, one will see conventional hate speech as prominent as offense taking.
Even when there are no real repercussions for the use of conventional hate speech, offense-taking or manufactured indignation is still a useful political strategy because most reasonable, moderately moral people don’t like to consider themselves as aggressors. It is always helpful to contextualize your hate campaigns in terms that suggest to your own group that they are the victims here.
DU: How has social media impacted the environment of hate spin, violence, and disinformation?
CG: The high amounts of engagement that hate speech and violence garner are indicators of the level of impunity that is out there. In the past, we used to say that exposing bad behavior would deter bad behavior, yet clearly, that is not the case. We also must ask and understand what people are getting out of this. Why are they posting and resharing hateful content? At first glance, one may assume that these videos are posted by citizen reporters yet what we’re now seeing is that they are filmed, uploaded, and shared by the perpetrators themselves. There is research out there by academics like Dr. Sahana Udupa who show that for a lot of hate actors, hate work is like a game. It’s fun. You actually build social capital by performing hate for your like-minded audience. This is pretty well known among hate scholars, but I don’t think it’s reached as wide of an audience as it should yet.
I also want to add that while a lot of the criticism of social media is valid, I do worry that a disproportionate amount of attention is given to hate on social media. The high attention from researchers, policymakers, and the media can sometimes give a false impression that these things wouldn’t have happened without social media, which is a bit of a stretch. Through over-emphasizing the role of social media, I think we underestimate the ingenuity of determined hate actors to get the job done. They will use whatever media is available to them; in a world in which social media is better regulated, they’ll find something else.
What I am most skeptical about in social media research is a sniper-like approach to hate speech. I have noticed that the vast majority of the work being done now has to do with hate speech detection and filtering on social media. This is grossly out of whack with what actual hate scholars will tell you about how hate speech operates. This disconnect is natural when the number of researchers who study tech, big data, and the internet vastly outnumber anthropologists and sociologists who study hate on the ground.
Internet giants love the former kind of research because it distracts from the research questions that they are afraid of — questions about how their business models affect the hate equation. It is then obvious why internet giants are willing to pour money into research that addresses the problem at the individual level. In understanding hate speech and violence, we must step away from analyzing hate speech as an individual utterance and focus on understanding long-term sustained hate campaigns.
DU: How would you recommend social media platforms modify their business models to better address high amounts of engagement that hate speech and violence?
CG: A lot of people are fed up with how social networking and video platforms reward engagement and virality over content. This is a huge problem when it comes to misinformation and disinformation. I’ve seen interesting experiments done in the U.S. and Europe where researchers recommend tweaks to the way platforms currently operate. For example, a young academic at NYU has conducted extremely interesting research that shows that people may “like” content even if they know it’s untrue. While the conventional view may be how this finding shows how terrible and immoral people can be, she and I dispute that, and suggest that perhaps the individual isn’t given the tools by these platforms to express what they really believe. What if, then, platforms added a trust/distrust button? Her research shows quite dramatic differences in people’s behavior if you add such a button. A trust/distrust button discourages the user from sharing material that they suspect is untrue because that would also generate distrust against the user. This diverts the motive of social media from simply engagement to also building and maintaining one’s reputation.
Other research demonstrates that individuals are as good as professional fact-checkers in discerning truth from untruth. So this idea that people are just stupid and mindlessly influenced must be debunked. The issue is that social media platforms do not actually give users a way to show their discernment, awareness, and sense of social responsibility. This is deliberate.
Researchers have sent their work and findings to internet giants who are very weary of adopting them because they are afraid that these refinements will make their sites less attractive and reduce engagement. Ultimately, it is virality that these platforms want.
With that being said, I don’t realistically see social media companies changing that much. Their priorities are different and they’re going to ignore critical research. We have to realize and accept that social media is a gross distortion of actual social networks. We have to find ways to engage people offline and build community. The challenge then becomes how do we actually get people together in settings that are less toxic and antisocial than social media platforms. This is being done in the U.S., in India, and elsewhere, and I think these spaces show an incredible impact. What they demonstrate is that if you bring together people from different communities in a relatively controlled environment with trained mediators, it is possible to have dialogue and deliberation that decrease polarization. This is a consistent finding from around the world. The limitation, however, is that because these spaces primarily work face-to-face, there is a cap on the number of people that can be present in any one setting. The challenge then is understanding how we can proliferate these spaces to compete against the very dysfunctional impact of social media platforms that instantly gain audiences of thousands or millions.
DU: You have been quoted saying that “assertive pluralism is not going to work without the much harder work of making our societies more just and rethinking the very idea of progress.” How do you suggest that we catalyze this rethinking?
CG: I actually haven’t used that term since that book, not because it’s wrong or because I’ve changed my mind. My upcoming book looks at how groups around the world are fighting polarization. From my observations and conversations with them, I’ve gathered that we have to treat hateful and anti-democratic groups seriously, but not necessarily literally. Groups fighting polarization are very big on deep listening to better understand what is going on in the minds of MAGA supporters or apparently racist individuals. There is an effort to be more tolerant of expression, which includes voting decisions that seem quite incomprehensible and almost fascist. I’ve observed that those who are on the frontlines fighting polarization say that people often make decisions to vote for a fascist candidate because they don’t have the options. Just because they’re voting for a fascist leader or an authoritarian populist leader does not mean that these leaders actually represent their own values.
We can’t underestimate how certain groups have been essentially ignored for decades. And it is not surprising that elite politics and media have ignored and patronized the working class and rural populations. So, if the only politician that seems to understand and acknowledge that the system doesn’t work for them happens to be right-wing, populist, racist, and fascist, don’t blame the citizens. This understanding is something I’ve consistently seen among the resistance to polarization in many countries.
The next question—a very old philosophical one— is this: When does a tolerant society become too tolerant? Do we tolerate forces that actually undermine a tolerant democracy? To answer this question, I am most persuaded by scholars like Chantal Mouffe. She emphasizes the importance of radical openness for democracy. We can’t shut out people because they seem to have extreme views. What Mouffe and other scholars say is that the bottom line is reciprocity. As long as you accept that others who are different from you deserve the same freedoms and equality as you want for yourself, we can do business. If you accept equal freedom and basic equality as a given for everyone, then we are a part of the same conversation. The non-negotiable is equal rights.
Groups fighting polarization do not leave much room for chance. There are trained facilitators present who understand that there is fear and anxiety on different sides. One of the standard approaches, which is often used in interfaith dialogues, is to cultivate a safe space by encouraging personal stories rather than political views. These approaches have been proven to work for some decades; the only problem is that they are very difficult to use on larger scales.
DU: How can efforts countering polarization work through the inherent difference of scaling?
CG: Well, the scaling issue is inherently why those working on social media would say that you can’t avoid trying to fix social media. Another exciting experiment I read about focuses on attempts to scale up measures countering polarization with the help of AI. Here, researchers suggest introducing a chatbot that advises—not forces—the user to rephrase their comments to be more deliberate rather than argumentative. The researchers brought people together with opposing views on gun control, and they found that a lot of people with very strong views on the topic were willing to accept the robot’s advice. The difference is here, they didn’t feel censored. This approach is different from filtering and blocking because the user posting such content is given the choice to accept or reject a recommendation. When provided with this choice, they often accept the recommendation. People then come out of the discussion with their emotions regulated, and they feel more positive and hopeful about democracy, even if they still maintain their original views. Their viewpoints aren’t changed but there is less animosity towards the other side. This research is so exciting because it is done by AI and is thus possible to scale up.
As I said earlier, when people are able to talk with others on the other side, there is quite a lot of movement of opinion. People even change their views after they get to listen to the other side, but setting up these conversations brings up the scalability issue. Organizing spaces for these kinds of conversations requires sufficient funding, time, and other resources. With that being said, people who have organized such spaces have done so online—and it does seem to work online. They’re also trying to see if they can replace the human-trained moderator with an AI moderator, which would allow for scaling up such measures. This all broadens the limits of what is possible.
Censoring and banning often backfires because people tend to underestimate just how smart and sophisticated these hate groups are. They’re thinking many steps ahead. There’s a lot of evidence that a lot of what the left hyperfixates on is what leads to their downfall. The right-wing very obviously uses these moments to distract from larger issues, so if you dominate the media cycle with problematic speech, it can take time away from problematic policy decisions that have serious implications. Ultimately, I think the most important thing is that we should not put all eggs in one basket. We should remain skeptical of the possibilities of using AI or any digital solution to counter hate. We should continue to heavily invest in offline communication, including face-to-face communication.