The use of understatements to promulgate hate speech
Threatened by the negative consequences of being canceled on social media, many online users have become hyperaware of the language they resort to. To avoid the backlash of being outwardly problematic, individuals online have turned to posting understatements, using words that carry less weight than the intended rhetoric they are spewing.
Conveying problematic opinions through sub-groups of mainstream Internet culture has been present since the early 2000s. Platforms such as 4chan and Reddit have become cesspools for users to find community through their ideologies, often circumventing the websites’ community guidelines by using code words and images with hidden meanings. One of the most popular examples of these dog whistles is the Pepe the Frog meme, used by Internet trolls, the KKK, and neo-Nazi groups, to make jokes at religious and racial minorities’ expense without explicitly doing so. Memes such as Pepe the Frog are not meant to be understood in this sense by mainstream populations. Instead, they are posted so that people with hateful ideologies can, often anonymously, exert a false sense of power over minorities without facing the consequences of their bigotry.
Another prominent way that racists and neo-Nazis signal to like-minded individuals that they are present on social media platforms is the “88” in many usernames, which refers to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, standing in for “Heil Hitler.”
There is a greater sensitivity associated with wording on social media, given that one’s words can rarely be taken back once they have been immortalized in Internet history. It has become insensitive and culturally inappropriate to refer to people by a distinctive quality as an adjective. People want to first be seen for themselves as individuals before the groups to which they belong. Many women have flagged the use of the noun “female” online, specifically by podcasters who share traditional views of gender roles, as indicators of their misogyny. Women on the Internet have stated that they prefer the noun “woman” to “female” because the latter likens them to animals. This ideal can only be achieved if people exercise greater care when choosing the words they use on the Internet.
While the particular attention put on word choice has made many spaces feel safer for more communities, an adverse effect is also happening. Hateful people are, like with the Pepe the Frog meme, turning towards unconventional means to express their problematic views. It is not so much a fear of offending people, but rather a fear of having one’s posts removed from an app, that encourages people to replace a hateful word with a word that carries less weight. They may turn to an altered version of a slur to both avoid having their posts removed and to freely express their hateful opinions in a covert fashion.
Changing a slur to an inoffensive term does not soften the blow of the opinions these creators are propagating, however. If anything, changing their vernacular so that they can post hateful content without it getting shut down allows them to build a community in which people feel secure in sharing their mean-spirited takes without the fear of being discovered. People who might have been reluctant to post something outwardly racist due to anxiety over their employer or university getting ahold of it become more likely to engage with a meme or post written with racist subtext that is not overtly incriminating. From behind a screen, posting hateful content is not only about intimidating and harassing minorities, but is also linked to a feeling of superiority for being in on a joke with other netizens.
The “policing” of language is about acknowledging larger issues and tackling them head-on. The bigger challenge, now, is being able to recognize when someone’s word choice online is minimizing a situation or implicitly spewing hatred. Spotting this trivialization of words, however, might be a taller order than simply seeing through a Pepe the Frog meme.