5. Countering Antisemitism Online

Abstract

Since their emergence on the web, social networks have elicited diverging reactions and opinions. If they are appreciated for helping create new forms of social relations, they are also criticised for facilitating both the emergence and circulation of hate speech. On a macro-level, different European countries have been taking a step forward to counter hate speech, but on a micro-level online comment sections show that some users try to counter it as well,namely by taking part in a discussion and/or reporting hate content. This chapter investigates the way users of French media counter antisemitic discourse in both Facebook and Twitter (now X) comment sections. The analysis was conducted on 4,230 comments posted on the official Facebook and Twitter pages of French mainstream media such as Le Monde and Le Figaro. The comments were divided in three sub-corpora according to the event they refer to. This way, it was possible to examine the specificities of the comments countering antisemitism in these three different contexts. The annotation and the analyses performed with the software MAXQDA shed light on the connections between the comments conveying antisemitism and those countering them, as well as on how counter speech can sometimes fuel antisemitism and other forms of hate speech