Multimodal hate speech: the case of Islamophobic memes

Abstract

As we understand them today, memes are typical products of Internet culture. As highly medium-specific discourse constructions, memes are multimodal in essence, combining image and text usually with humouristic purposes (cf. Milner 2012). However, the very notion of humour is problematic, and memes have evolved towards other communicative functions, some of which may be interpreted closer to extreme speech and radicalisation (cf. Fielitz/Thurston 2019). This paper analyses a collection of 150 islamophobic memes, multimodal artifacts that convey a negative image of Muslims and Islam (cf. Runnymede Trust 1997), retrieved from some of the most popular Internet meme sites from 2016 to 2020. The detailed analysis of the corpus will help us understand how ideology is shaped through different multimodal structures, the frequent combination of extremism and humour, and, ultimately, how the mass consumption of apparently innocuous artifacts of digital culture may lead to the desensitisation of hate speech.