ABSTRACT

Drawing from the literature on the psychological harm of hate speech and the source magnification framework, we investigated the effects of hate messages from multiple sources on target group members in the context of Twitter. An online experiment conducted with Black Americans living in the United States provided evidence for source magnification of anti-Black messages. In the experiment, participants were exposed to one of three sets of tweets: hate tweets from multiple sources, hate tweets (of identical content) from a single source, and non-hate (control) tweets. The results showed that hate tweets from multiple sources, when compared to the identical hate messages from a single source and to the non-hate tweets, led to greater emotional distress, which, in turn, resulted in greater likelihood of attributing ambiguous social situations to racial prejudice. The findings provide initial evidence for source magnification of hate messages in the context of communication based on social media where simultaneous exposure to asynchronously posted hate messages from multiple sources is likely to happen. The findings also suggest that multiple-source hate messages, when compared to single-source hate messages, are more likely to indirectly result in potential relational harm.

摘要

从有关仇恨言论的心理危害和来源放大框架的文献中，我们研究了Twitter背景下来自多个来源的仇恨消息对目标群体成员的影响。与居住在美国的美国黑人进行的一项在线实验为反黑人信息的来源放大提供了证据。在实验中，参与者被暴露于三组推文之一：来自多个来源的仇恨推文，来自单个来源的仇恨推文（内容相同）和非仇恨（对照）推文。结果表明，与来自单一来源的讨厌消息相比，来自多个来源的仇恨消息和与非仇恨消息相比，仇恨消息导致了更大的情绪困扰，进而，导致将歧义的社会情况归因于种族偏见的可能性更大。该发现为基于社交媒体的交流中仇恨消息的来源放大提供了初步证据，其中社交媒体可能同时暴露于来自多个来源的异步发布的仇恨消息。研究结果还表明，与单源仇恨消息相比，多源仇恨消息更可能间接导致潜在的关系伤害。