understood to influence our real-world culture.
Threats of violence toward non-white communities, mobilization of white nationalists, and the emergence of racist conspiracies have flourished on social media under the misdirected guise of free thinking and free speech.
Racialized hate on social media have direct
consequences, as they are easily amplified and spread. Twitter reported a 77 percent increase in hate speech on its platform from July to December 2020 and took action against 1,126,990 accounts during that six-month period. No person was more notorious for his actions on social media than former President Donald Trump, who was permanently suspended on Twitter due to the likelihood his messages would incite physical violence. Previous evidence also tied the former president’s online anti-Asian, anti-Black, and anti-LatinX sentiments to the violence and threats that those racialized communities continue to experience today.
Early attitudes about the impact of offensive speech on social media tended to acknowledge the presence of a “few bad actors” online, but argued that muting, blocking, or ignoring those accounts would counteract any negativity that those posts would cause. Today, we have evidence that those who encounter racialized aggressions
on social media exhibit decreased mental well-being, deteriorated emotional health, and lowered psychological outcomes.
The continued growth of online hate and the escalation of racialized aggressions suggests we can no longer ignore how racist toxicity has fermented and galvanized white nationalism within these online spaces. Anyone who has taken inventory of the emergence of far-right social media sites such as Gab (alternative to Twitter), Rumble (alternative to YouTube), Telegram (messaging app used by QAnon) and MeWe (alternative to Facebook) will tell you racism is being cultivated faster, stronger, and more dangerously today than it has at any
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