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This report analyses public-private relations between the European (in particular, French) authorities and Facebook, Google (YouTube) and Twitter on the subject of terrorist usage of social media between 2015 and 2019. In a qualitative approach, interview material is mobilised to investigate lived experiences of this early cooperation, focusing on how stakeholders defined and negotiated their involvement, navigated power relations and pursued strategies to establish working relations without abandoning their respective preferences. The report finds that, although cultural fault lines influenced the stakeholders’ perceptions of roles, enthusiasm for ‘automated’ moderation was shared across the public-private boundary, justifying the development of what can be called state-platform diplomacy.

People use social media platforms to chat, search, and share information, express their opinions, and connect with others. But these platforms also facilitate the posting of divisive, harmful, and hateful messages, targeting groups and individuals, based on their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or political views.Hate content is not only a problem on the Internet, but also on traditional media,especially in places where the Internet is not widely available or in rural areas.Despite growing awareness of the harms that exposure to hate can cause, especially to victims, there is no clear consensus in the literature on what specific impacts this exposure, as bystanders, produces on individuals, groups, and the population at large. Most of the existing research has focused on analyzing the content and the extent of the problem. More research in this area is needed to develop better intervention programs that are adapted to the current reality of hate. The objective of this review is to synthesize the empirical evidence on how media exposure to hate affects or is associated with various outcomes for individuals and groups.

This essay contributes to a materialist theory of media populism by criticizing America First, an influential U.S. American reactionary live-stream hosted by Nicholas J. Fuentes, and its Groyper fans. Fuentes has expanded his online presence despite the deplatforming, or administrative suspension, of his social media accounts on account of his antisemitic, antiblack, and sexist hate speech. To understand the ideological ramifications of deplatforming populist influencers, I read clips from America First into the economic and infrastructural context of U.S. far-right subcultures. I argue that media studies must attend to bourgeois digital platform management as a technology which reproduces the undemocratic conditions of racial capitalism. The deplatforming of Fuentes facilitates the ascent of reactionary populism by reinforcing possessive individualism, or a white masculine fantasy of unmediated access to the public. “The people” of populism functions as media whose lost presence naturalizes sovereign violence against marginalized people. Media populism illustrates the need for to move beyond the dichotomy of “mainstream” versus “fringe” platforms to consider the material affinity of bourgeois digital publics and white nationalist provocation.