CHARLOTTE — Channel 9 recently shared two local examples of hate speech posted on TikTok, but experts who monitor social media sites are sounding the alarm, saying there’s an increase in posts involving hate speech.
One of the posts involved two high school students. The other involved a grown man. Both of those cases were on TikTok, and social media experts say they’re examples of a new rise in hate speech that has seen damaging results.
“We should bring back slavery,” said one student at Lincoln Charter School in a TikTok video.
“Roll down your window so you can hear me, you [expletive],” said a man on a motorcycle toward another driver in Gastonia. Video of that incident went viral on TikTok, gaining hundreds of thousands of views.
The words are haunting and hurtful; researchers told Channel 9′s Ken Lemon that the one most-often used is the N-word being hurled at Black people.
“It’s a word that should not be used in society,” said Dr. Darial Jackson with St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church in Gastonia.
Jackson is part of a group of Black ministers who speak out against offensive acts. He says the N-word harkens back to slavery, and it’s a verbal representation of oppression.
“[It says] I’m less than a man, I’m less than a human being, I’m nobody,” Jackson said.
Researchers at Montclair State University in New Jersey say the pain associated with the N-word is probably the reason it was posted 4,700 times within 12 hours after Twitter relaxed its monitoring standards last week.
“It didn’t surprise us that this is the term that they used, that they led with, because it’s so powerful and so negative,” said Dr. Bond Benton with MSU.
Benton says those racist posts on Twitter reached 3 million people. He said it’s likely that extremists and hate groups pranked Twitter in the first half of the day, and that others followed suit.
“By using these terrible words and making it prominent for a day, everybody feels slightly more comfortable using those words,” Benton said.
According to Benton, the gunman accused of killing 10 Black shoppers at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, this year was motivated by hate speech on a much smaller fringe social media platform.
The Southern Poverty Law Center monitors thousands of social media accounts and has detected a noticeable bump in hate speech over the last two weeks.
“Almost twice as many commentaries around bigoted discriminatory ideas,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas with the SPLC.
Carroll Rivas told Channel 9 that this often happens around elections, when political discord can turn to blind hate.
“What we hope is that our hard work will sort of dampen that a little bit,” Carroll Rivas said.
Those experts said people who post offensive material on social media have to be held accountable for their own actions. Both research groups are working on media literacy, hoping to keep people from getting pulled into extremist groups.
Channel 9′s Ken Lemon spoke to the man on the motorcycle who used the N-word after our story aired. He said he was ashamed seeing himself in the video, and he apologized for yelling at the woman.
(WATCH BELOW: ‘Hateful and inappropriate’: Chester County school officials investigating racist video)
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