Coca-Cola Curses: Hate Speech in a Post-Colonial Context
Hate speech is a contextual phenomenon. What offends or inflames in one context may differ from what incites violence in a different time, place, and cultural landscape. This paper discusses how online hate speech may operate differently in a postcolonial context. While hate speech impacts all societies, the global South—Africa in particular—has been sorely understudied. The author posits that in postcolonial circumstances, the interaction of multiple cultural contexts and social meanings form concurrent layers of interpretation that are often inaccessible to outsiders. This study expands the concept of online harms by examining the political, social, and cultural dimensions of data-intensive technologies.
