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Copyright

Carmen Aguilera-Carnerero; Matthias J. Becker; Marcus Scheiber;

Published On

2025-05-02

Page Range

pp. 79–106

Language

  • English

5. Same tools, different target

Countering hate speech with memes

Chapter of: Imagery of Hate Online(pp. 79–106)
While memes, as communication practices, are inherently pluralistic and designed to express diverse opinions, they can also be used to propagate hateful ideologies. This is largely due to their strategic dissemination within moderate milieus of the digital public sphere (Ebner 2023). As a result, memes can act as catalysts for harmful ideas, contributing to the normalisation of hate (Schulze et al. 2022: 42). However, the same mechanisms that enable the spread of hate speech can be repurposed by digital actors to promote counter-speech and resist this normalisation. This chapter explores the multimodal communication strategies used in counter-speech memes, with a particular focus on their role in combating Islamophobia.

Contributors

Carmen Aguilera-Carnerero

(author)
https://www.ugr.es/en/staff/maria-carmen-aguilera-carnerero

Dr Carmen Aguilera-Carnerero obtained her degree and Ph.D. at the department of English and German Philology at the University of Granada, Spain, where she currently teaches. Her post-doctoral research focused on the study of extreme speech online, especially on CyberIslamophobia, the online discourse of the post-war ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, the cyberhetoric of the far-right, the semiotics of terrorism and the communicative force of graffiti. She authored the Spanish section of the European Islamophobia report in 2016, 2017, and 2018. She has been a guest speaker at the University of Munich, Charles II University in Prague, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, at the European Foundation of Arab Studies, Casa Árabe in Madrid and the European Parliament, among others. She has spoken on her research topics for different national and international media.

Matthias J. Becker

(author)
Postdoc Researcher at University of Cambridge
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2847-4542

Dr Matthias J. Becker is a linguist specialising in pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, and social media studies, with a particular emphasis on researching prejudice and hatred. He studied linguistics, philosophy, and literature at Freie Universität Berlin and has contributed to several research projects focusing on the use of language in political and media campaigns. For over twelve years, his research has focused on the analysis of implicit hate speech—often normalised within mainstream political discourse—and the underlying conditions that enable its emergence. Matthias is the creator and lead of the Decoding Antisemitism research project and Postdoc Researcher at the University of Cambridge and Technische Universität Berlin.

Marcus Scheiber

(author)
PhD Researcher at University of Vechta
https://orcid.org/0009-0006-1714-2015

Marcus Scheiber is a discourse semiotician specialising in critical discourse analysis, internet linguistics, multimodal research and antisemitism research. He started his academic career at the Universities of Heidelberg and Bern, and as a visiting researcher and lecturer at the University of Mumbai. He received his MA from the University of Heidelberg in 2018 with a thesis about internet memes. He is currently working on a Ph.D. project at the University of Vechta and the University of Vienna, in which he is investigating how the communication format of memes is used for antisemitic communication strategies in the digital sphere.