Hate Speech Anthropologies. Evil, Democracy, and Social Media: between Popper and Girard

The problem of violence in the evolution on the debate about free speech certainly does not begin at the time of new digital technologies and hate speech. Already Popper identified the risks of the effects of television for liberal democracies, identifying a possible educational role for the media as much as the difficulty of making it concretely operational. The problem needs an anthropological approach, relating to a theory capable of posing the problem of containing violence beyond reliance on mere normative regulation in positive law. The article attempts to extend Girardian analyses about the mimetic structure of desire to the field of social networks and their evolution, moving from Dupuy’s fixed point theory. The concluding analysis of the mechanisms of interaction between influencers and followers shows how the ambiguity of the use of social media constitutes a problem at once cultural, technological, and normative, requiring an anthropological conception reintroducing evil and envy as explanatory principles of the relationship between followers and influencers.