Malin Roitman, Grégoire Lacaze, Christophe Premat, Françoise Sullet-Nylander, and Samuel Vernet (eds.). Social media and digital platforms: polarization and hate speech. Nordic Journal of Francophone Studies 9(1). Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2026.
This special collection, Digital Media and Democratic Debates: Hate Speech and Digitized Discourse – the Benefits and the Costs of Online Discourses, examines how digital media transform the conditions of democratic deliberation. Bringing together interdisciplinary contributions, the volume explores hate speech as a key analytical lens through which tensions between freedom of expression, platform governance, regulation, and power relations become visible.
The articles address diverse contexts, including European legal frameworks, North and West Africa, North America, and contemporary geopolitical conflicts. They analyze cyber harassment, digital activism, ideological polarization, conspiracy narratives, identity discourses, and the circulation and instrumentalization of the notion of “hate speech” itself. Special attention is given to the role of algorithms, anonymity, echo chambers, and counter-speech in shaping online interactions.
By combining discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, rhetorical approaches, and socio-political theory, the volume highlights the ambivalent nature of digital platforms: while they enable new forms of civic participation and visibility for marginalized voices, they also intensify verbal violence, symbolic domination, and democratic fragmentation.