Dr Anjalee de Silva, Communities in Control Conference 2023

Hate speech, abuse and anger are everywhere online. What can we do to combat them? How can we support those who deal with them?

“Hate speech against women delegitimises democracy and represents a crisis of democracy in itself.”

– Dr Anjalee de Silva

“In Australia, female politicians across the political spectrum have spoken openly about their many and varied experiences of communicative conduct that may reasonably be described as hate speech. So, Ditch the Witch was famously said of Julia Gillard while she was former Labor PM. Mehreen Faruqi, who is a Greens Party Senator, has written candidly of the intersectional and especially vitriolic sex-based vilification that she is subjected to as a Muslim woman of colour. Sarah Hanson-Young, also a Greens Party Senator, recently brought a successful defamation claim against a former male politician with respect to speech that also constituted hate speech. So, there is a sense in which some of this speech overlaps categories of harm as well. It might be hate speech, and it might also be defamatory speech.”

– Dr Anjalee de Silva

About Dr Anjalee de Silva

Dr Anjalee de Silva is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. She is also a Fellow of the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia and a local government Councillor on Monash City Council, where she also serves on the Gender Equity Advisory Committee.