Paper short abstract:

The paper provides a comparative perspective to dangerous speech in the social media in Ethiopia and EU and methods proposed to counter it.

Paper long abstract:

Debates on digital cultures are increasingly turning to its "dark side": to the many risks associated with online and social media behavior. The risks associated with the dark side of internet freedoms, however, exist in the horizon of our unknowable futures: in the potential terrorist attack that was facilitated by them; in the youngsters that might be radicalized by them; or in the polarisation of conflict that the proliferation of hate speech can bring about. A new "dispositif" of risk, scholars have argued, has thus emerged through which these imagined dangers are now contained and controlled. Indeed many of the political, legal and technological mechanisms adopted have been designed to predict and prevent these future dangers: early warning systems, surveillance and censorship, predictive policing, monitoring of online radicalization, forcing internet intermediaries to remove speech that could be considered hateful and offensive.

This debate linking contemporary digital cultures with their imagined risks, however, has been largely inflected by a Euro-American discourse on war on terror and its particular understanding of risk. This paper hopes to broaden the debate by providing a comparative perspective to extreme speech in global digital cultures and methods proposed to counter it. Based on research on hate speech in the social media in Ethiopia and the EU, the paper proposes a more situated perspective that takes into account the specific cultures of communication, political context, and media practices involved in the production of extreme speech as well as mechanisms proposed to counter and control it.