Textual and Non-verbal Expressions of Cyberhate in South African Social Media Misconduct Dismissals

The digital has facilitated a lexicon and an iconography of hate. This economy of cyberhate reiterates historical and established representations of hate in combination with digitally unique hateful signifiers. This chapter draws upon an examination of two first instance contested South African social media dismissal decisions for racist and discriminatory posts to highlight the lexicon and iconography of hate in the ‘post-literate’ digital. It argues that cyberhate involves not only the textuality of hateful words, but is further framed by the iconography of the post (the typographic qualities of the text, the deployment of punctuation including capitalisation to simulate cyber-shouting, shorthand language mimicking the vernacular of ‘gangsta rap,’ and monkey emojis imbued with polysemantic potential). This chapter examines primary legal materials as a digital witness to cyberhate, decisions as ‘social records’ of cyberhate as opposed to formal statement of institutional legality. Ultimately, this chapter contributes to the existing body of social media, digital communication and cyberhate literature by expanding the horizons to the Sub-Saharan Global South context.