Hate Speech Within Meme Culture

The difference between hate speech and free speech has long been debated. While free speech is the protected right for individuals to use words, symbols and actions to freely express their opinions, freedom of speech does not protect obscene material or speech that may incite harm or threat to others. That's where hate speech comes in. Hate speech is defined as any communication that disparages a person or a group based on a characteristic such as race or sexual orientation (Levy and Karst, 2000).

Though it seems like there should easily be a clear distinction between the two, the line between the two terms has begun to blur. What may be perceived as hateful or offensive by one party, may be viewed as a comedic joke by another. From my experience, one way to clearly identify if something is hate speech is to take the side of the offended. In my opinion, if someone's overuse of their right to free speech causes emotional, mental or physical harm to another person, that is hate speech.

In the case of COVID-19, hate speech manifested in a number of different ways, but particularly when in reference to the origin of the virus. Originating from China, the COVID-19 virus elicited many microaggressions, racist and xenophobic comments from people, particularly those with white privilege. Terms such as “Chinese virus,” “kung flu” or “poor person’s disease" began to gain popularity when speaking about COVID-19, largely because these terms were first publicly used by our president.

While some found these kinds of terms funny, others were deeply wounded by them. Due to the widespread use of these terms, Asian-Americans instantly became targets. In public spaces people began to make untrue and biased assumptions about Asian-Americans… thoughts that they came from China and were carriers of the virus… that they were probably caring for sick family members… even that they were a part of a large scheme to spread the virus to “safe” America. The use of these hateful and racist terms did in fact incite harm on Asian-Americans with racial slurs being passed in the streets and even hate crimes.

One of the most popular ways our modern-day society allows hate speech to spread is through the use of memes. I’m sad to say that since 2020 began and the virus began to make its way to America from 2020, I’ve seen countless memes and gifs circulating the internet that reinforce digital forms of hate speech. I’ve gone and created a meme that mimics many of the hateful memes I’ve seen online over the past several months.

Creating this meme truly made me uncomfortable, but sadly is was incredibly easy to do. With technology at our fingertips, hateful meme-making has become easier and more widespread. Now, instead of solely hearing hate speech in verbal conversation, it is being used in the forms of gifs, memes and other forms of social media gimmicks. As a result of these digital forms of stereotypes, biases and hate speech, targeted groups are not able to escape the horrific and racist comments being made about them.

The next time we are scrolling through our social media timelines, I hope we pay special attention to the memes and other graphical content in our feeds. We must ask ourselves, is this a demonstration of free speech or hate speech?