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The internet and social media are central arenas for spreading racist content and hate speech, and for many active internet users, exposure to racist content has become a common part of their digital lives. The research literature has focused on how everyday experiences of racism tend to come in the form of subtle, covert and ambiguous experiences of stigmatisation and discrimination – and this is often seen in contrast to the ‘old’ racism, which was expressed in more direct, overt and explicit ways. However, the literature on everyday racism has largely overlooked the online sphere, where ‘old-fashioned,’ overt racism remains highly present. Still, we have little knowledge about how members of targeted groups experience and understand online hate and racism.
Drawing on qualitative interviews with 20 young Muslims, I have studied how young Muslims in Norway make sense of the racist content they encounter online. As Muslims in the Norwegian context, these young people belong to a racialised group that is typically ascribed a position as both ethnic and religious ‘other’ commonly targeted by hate speech. I analyse their experiences with- and understandings of the nature and causes of online racism and use this information to develop an analytical framework for studying ordinary people’s understanding of racism.
Normalised Overt Racism Online
For the young Muslims interviewed, exposure to online racism was not a rare or isolated event – it was a pervasive and normalised aspect of their digital lives. They described encountering a massive volume of racist and Islamophobic content in comments sections, social media posts, and online debates. This hostility often targeted their ethnic, religious, and/or cultural identities, and they experienced the different types of hostility as more or less interchangeable.
One respondent, for example, shared her experience of being targeted and attacked online after publishing an opinion piece in a national newspaper. She noted how the attacks fixated on both her religious affiliation and ethnic background, illustrating how online hostility often blurs the boundaries between different categories of “otherness”.
Furthermore, the respondents experienced online racism as inevitable and unavoidable, particularly if you make yourself visible online. Although not all the young Muslims had experienced online attacks themselves, they had witnessed how others are treated online and expected that they could easily be subject to the same harassment. As one woman concluded: ‘If others are [attacked] in the comments section, I’ll be as well’. The scope and inevitable nature of online racism mean that for these young Muslims – who spend a significant amount of time online – exposure to overt racism becomes an everyday and almost normalised aspect of their digital lives.
Experiencing Racism Online: Distance and Control
Despite the explicit nature of online racism, the young Muslims in the study generally perceived it as less severe than racism encountered in offline settings. This perception is shaped by the characteristics of the online sphere, which creates a sense of distance between the victim and the perpetrator. For example, respondents often described online attacks as impersonal, targeting their internet persona, or targeting them as members of a group rather than as individuals. This depersonalisation made it easier for them to dismiss the hate speech as less significant.
At the same time, the perception that they can control their exposure to online racism provided a sense of agency. Many respondents noted that they could "log off" or avoid certain platforms to shield themselves from hostile content. However, this comes with its own trade-offs, as disengaging from online spaces can limit their participation in public debates and social interactions.
Importantly, the respondents also highlighted the ambivalence surrounding the anonymity of online perpetrators. While anonymity can make it easier to dismiss racist comments, it can also give rise to fear and insecurity about the intentions of the perpetrator and their potential for violence outside of the online sphere.
Theories of Online Racism: Intentionality and Exceptionality
A key finding from the study is the variation in how the young Muslims interpreted the causes of online racism. Their "theories" of online racism differed along two dimensions: intentionality (whether online racism reflects genuine racist sentiments) and exceptionality (whether it represents a fringe phenomenon or a broader societal issue). Figure 1 illustrates how these two analytical dimensions capture the distinctions between different explanatory understandings of racism in the empirical material. These understandings of online racism are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and the respondents sometimes communicated different understandings of online racism in different parts of the interviews.
Figure 1: "Theories" of online racism
- Racist Norway: Many respondents believed that online racism reveals the true sentiments of ordinary Norwegians. They described the internet as a space where people feel free to express their real thoughts, unfiltered by social norms. For these respondents, online racism was not an exception but a mirror of societal attitudes.
- Exceptional racism: Others viewed online racism as the work of a small, vocal minority rather than a reflection of broader societal views. They pointed to the role of algorithms and media dynamics in amplifying extreme voices, creating a distorted picture of Norwegian society.
- Trolling: Some respondents interpreted online racism as a form of trolling from a small minority of internet users, aimed more at provoking reactions than expressing genuine beliefs. While this view downplays the intentionality of racism, it does not necessarily negate the harm caused by such provocations.
- Ignorance: A final group attributed online racism to ignorance rather than malice, describing perpetrators as uninformed individuals—often older adults—who lack digital literacy and exposure to diversity.
These different interpretations highlight the complexity of online racism and the diverse ways in which its targets make sense of it.
Contemporary Racism Happens Both Offline and Online
The young Muslims in this study experienced online racism as massive and widespread to the extent that they perceived it as an unavoidable and almost normalised aspect of being online. Their understandings of the nature and expressions of online racism stand in stark contrast to accounts of the covert, ambiguous and subtle nature of “new” and “modern” forms of everyday racism.
At the same time, their experience of online racism were shaped by the realm where it occurs – and in some ways seemed easier to handle than offline instances of racism.
While the young Muslims in the study had a shared understanding of online racism as a phenomenon, they had different understandings of the causes of online racism which in turn shaped the impact such rhetoric had on them. Thus, this study shows that to fully understand the nature of contemporary racism, we need to incorporate knowledge about the experiences of online racism, its specificities and its impact on its victims.
