The African Leadership Centre (ALC) and the Institute for Peace and Security Studies (IPSS), Addis Ababa University, and all partners are pleased to invite you to our second NCIRI seminar series event titled “Social Media Users' Online Behavior with Regard to the Circulation of Hate Speech”, which will be held on Tuesday, 05 November 2024, from 11:00 GMT/12:00 WAT/13:00 Ethiopia Time.

About the event

Online hate speech is ripping Ethiopian society apart and threatening the values of democracy, human dignity, and peaceful coexistence. The current study argues that understanding people’s responses to hateful posts helps combat hate speech online. Therefore, this study aims to comprehend the roles social media users play in responding to online hate speech.

To this end, 14 hate speech posts, each with more than 1,000 comments, were collected from the public space of four purposefully selected YouTube news channels and four Facebook accounts, which were considered as hot spots for the circulation of hate speech during the data collection period. Then, 100 random comments were collected from each hate speech post using exportcomment.com, which automatically extracts comments from social media posts in excel format. After extracting a total of 1,400 random comments, 460 of them were removed because they were found irrelevant and unclear to be coded and analyzed. Then, inductive coding was employed to identify, refine, and name codes and themes that describe the main roles played by social media users in reacting to the hate speeches.

The findings showed five major roles social media users play in responding to hateful content: trolling, peace-making, informing, and guarding. The paper discusses the findings and provides recommendations deemed necessary to counter online hate speeches.

The presentation will reflect on the research that has been published. You can find this research here.

About the chair

Dr Mercy Fekadu Mulugeta is Associate Professor and Deputy Director at the Institute for Peace and Security Studies, Addis Ababa University.

About the speaker

Dr Tadesse Megersa is a Lecturer at Ambo University, Ethiopia

About the discussants

Dr Nayanka Paquete Perdigão is an ALC Research Associate and former Partnerships and Programs Lead at the Global Internet Forum to Counter-Terrorism (GIFCT).

Jesutimilehin O. Akamo is Head of our Research and Policy Analysis Unit at the Institute of Peace and Security Studies, Addis Ababa University.

About the seminar series

The Nurturing Capacities for Interdisciplinary Research and Impact (NCIRI) Seminar Series is a new initiative from the ARUA-Guild Cluster of Research Excellence (CoRE) on Interdisciplinary Peace.