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Top1. Introduction
Social media sites provide convenient interaction among the users irrespective of their background, and location (Amedie, 2015; Kapoor et al., 2018; Sawyer & Chen, 2012). The negative side of social media use may affect human behavior resulting in antisocial activities (Amedie, 2015), depression (Shensa et al., 2017), and generation of problematic content. Some of the problematic contents are harassment, pornography, hate speech (Gillespie, 2018), and fake news (Caplan et al., 2018). Expression of hatred through social media is a prevalent and serious issue because it is difficult to provide barriers (Mondal et al., 2018) and social media supports rapid amplification (Jubany & Roiha, 2016) to hate content.
The concept of hate is contradictory. Different researchers argue differently like hate is derived from motive, emotion, and an attitude (Brudholm, 2010; Opotow and McClelland, 2007; Rempel and Burris, 2005). Hate can be expressed with passion: anger/fear, intimacy negation: disgust, and commitment: devaluation (Sternberg, 2003). Intergroup conflicts often occur with anger emotion (Halperin & Gross, 2011; Bar-Tal, 2007). Due to its aggressive nature, anger is often considered a destructive emotion for intergroup conflicts (Halperin et al., 2011).
Hate being discriminative, acts against an individual who belongs to any identifiable group such as gender, religion, race, and disability (Chetty & Alathur, 2018; Jay, 2009; Masucci & Langton, 2017). Bias-motivated crimes are more prone to penalties than non-bias motivated crimes (Dharmapala & Garoupa, 2004; Lawrence, 1994). All offensive contents may not be harmful (Hargrave et al., 2009). No global mechanism exists to state the content/speech as offensive by nature (Jay & Janschewitz, 2008), it is situational. The harms of online hate may be individual, collective, and social (Salminen et al., 2020; Vidgen and Yasseri, 2020).
The concept of religious hate has been originated during the British rule in India as a result of their divide and rule technique to control citizens (Hartnack, 2012; Alam et al., 2016). With the impact of this rule, both India and Pakistan have been separated and still fighting with religious hatred. Hate is using to divide the citizen based on protected groups or characteristics, particularly based on religion. Social media can be used for spreading hate content through posting/tweeting content, sharing/retweeting the content, liking the content, stereotypes, and images. Recently, social media has played a role in communal violence in different parts of India (Narrain, 2017).
Being the largest democratic country, India allows free speech under laws and the constitution. On the other hand, freedom of expression is restricted online for the betterment of the citizen in terms of defamation, national security, and communal harmony. The laws and techniques used to restrict free speech are undermining the freedom of expression in India. This restriction is a result of social and political pressure. In Information Technology Act (IT Act) with related amendments, there is no clear definition of the offensive and no clear information on how to behave online and offline (Patry, 2013). This unclear information may be the reason for the generation, reporting, and removal of offensive content.
In India, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (ICERT), a unit of the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology is responsible for reviewing and blocking access to specific websites or information. After reviewing the received requests for blocking, ICERT will instruct to ISPs for the purpose.