Facebook and hate speech: Analyzing relationship between consumers' attributes and islamic sectarian content on social media in Pakistan

Abstract

Religious extremism has been one of the major areas of concentration by communication scholars throughout the world. In Pakistan, i t has been obs er ved t hat the sectarian division on the occasions like Muharram increase immensely. As a result, spread of hate speech also increases on social media by Shias and Sunnis. Therefore, this study is aimed to find out a relationship between the demographics of consumers of Facebook and the posting of hateful material against other sects. It also aspired to investigate whether the socio-economic background, education or gender plays any role in determining the level of spread of hate speech against any sect. For this purpose, while drawing upon the theory of Uses and Gratification, a sample of 100 users of Facebook were surveyed through questionnaire developed on 5-point Likert scale. It was found that the people from different sects like to post and share the hate speech. The study also explored that there was a strong relationship in level of religiosity and posting of hate speech, the more the tilt towards religious practices, the more consumers post hateful speech on Facebook pages,.