Responding to Hate Speech on Social Media: A Class Leads a Student Movement

In the Spring of 2012, fans of the Gonzaga University basketball team used hate speech on social media site Twitter to express their frustration at losing a game to the Brigham Young University team. In response, the students in the Hate Studies in Business course started a student-led movement to “Take the Hate Out of Hoops.” The students applied their lessons in virtue ethics and leveraged the experiential structure of the course to create a positive response to a negative event. It was through the unique study of hate, the recognition that membership in a community implies responsibility for harms perpetuated by that community, and the action-oriented nature of this class that students were moved to respond to this instance of injustice. This paper describes the course, the incident of hate speech, the students’ response, and the lessons learned by the four instructors of the course. Responding to Hate Speech on Social Media: A Class Leads a Student Movement