Social Media Misconduct Dismissals in South Africa: Forms of Hate Speech in First Instance Employment Decisions
This thesis is located in the law and society tradition and used content analysis techniques to examine 400 first instance social media misconduct dismissal decisions as ‘social records’ rather than doctrinal statements of black-letter law. In doing so, the research revealed racism and racialised hate to be significant forms of hate speech circulating in the digital. Racialised hate materialised not only through the textual (hateful words) but also through the deployment of multimodal meaning-making to proliferate hate through non-textual (images) and meta-textual signifiers (extra-linguistic features such as semantic typography, non-standard orthography, and pictograms with polysemic potential) in South African workspaces.