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Public Historians, Social Media, and Hate Speech: The French Case

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Abstract

Hate speech plays a role in shaping public opinion and, in some cases, forms its backbone. The chapter aims at examining the potential and the limitations of shared authority for preventing the abuse of history and hate speech in social media. The chapter focusses on the French context, in particular by analyzing, on the one hand, how anti-Semitic hate speech is propagated online, diffusing its ideas in an uncontrolled and pervasive manner, and on the other, how public historians can face this phenomenon. The main argument of the chapter is that contemporary modes of communication, which have substantially shifted online and to social media, greatly increase the size of potential and actual audiences for hate speech and anti-Semitic agitation.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 732942 and was written in the context of the ODYCCEUS H2020 Research Project (https://www.odycceus.eu/).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Corsica, UMR LISA, Corte, France

    Deborah Paci

  2. University of Bologna, Department of History and Cultures, Bologna, Italy

    Deborah Paci

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  1. Deborah Paci
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Correspondence to Deborah Paci .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Arts and Creative Industries, Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, UK

    Anne Schwan

  2. School of Arts and Creative Industries, Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, UK

    Tara Thomson

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Paci, D. (2022). Public Historians, Social Media, and Hate Speech: The French Case. In: Schwan, A., Thomson, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11886-9_25

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