Blaming the Scapegoat
Blaming the Scapegoat

Summary/Abstract: Hate speech and media manipulation plays a key role in inciting ethnic tensions and collective violence. Hate speech serves as a mobilizing “call to arms” against the perceived enemy, which in reality is only a scapegoat. Media manipulation allows mass dissemination of the hate message, intensifying the collective emotion and serving the power goals of extremist leadership. While not all hate speech leads to outbreaks of collective violence, all of it is potentially socially disruptive because it contributes to accumulation of ethnic tension and because through scapegoating it fixes public attention on false problems and illusory goals.

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