The Thin Line Between Harmful and Benign: Perceptions of Humorous and Non-Humorous Hate Speech in Humorous and Neutral Social Media Contexts (Media Psychology)

By portraying norm violations as less serious, humor can mask the damaging character of hate speech, but little is known about how social media environments influence these impressions. This study uses the Benign Violation Theory to investigate how platform context (humorous vs. neutral), individual attitudes, and content style (humorous vs. non-humorous) affect people’s judgments of hate speech as harmless. In contrast to contextual cues, which had no discernible impact, hilarious anti-migrant hate speech raised perceptions of benignity, according to an online poll of 827 German-speaking social media users (ages 18 to 30). Benign interpretations were more closely linked to personal views, especially social distance. These results highlight how, in online communication, humor and personal conventions can conflate harm and benignity.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15213269.2025.2580291