JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 3 cause for concern. But it is important to be clear on why. “Hate speech,” as well as other genres such as “misinformation,” are moral categories, based on normative values such as dignity, justice, or truth.10 They warrant concern independent of any conclusions regard­ ing causal effects.11 How speech on Facebook might contribute to causing violence, on the other hand, is a question of function. Many forms of speech can serve this function and they are not limited to speech that is about the victims.12 That analyses of Facebook and the Rohingya genocide, as well as other nascent efforts to understand the relationship between social media and genocide, have focused so nar­ rowly on genres like “hate speech” or “misinformation” aligns with the way genocide is commonly understood as a crime of hatred and irrationality.13 But Moses has demon­ strated that this is not a simple failure of understanding.14 It is intrinsic to genocide as a legal and moral category, which achieved its status as crime worse than all others pre­ cisely because it is defined by perpetrator intentions – group hatred.15 I take this as an 10 11 12 13 14 15 repeatedly emphasized news about Islamic “terrorist” activity elsewhere in the world. Prasse-Freeman, “Hate Bait”; see also Matt Schissler, “On Islamophobes and Holocaust Deniers: Making Sense of Violence, in Myanmar and Else­ where,” in Conflict in Myanmar: War, Politics, Religion, ed. Nick Cheesman, Nicholas Farrelly, and Trevor Wilson (Sin­ gapore: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2016), 285–312. Even as they depart from the “hate speech” category, however, such analyses still remain focused exclusively on content with the same object of reference, an out-group different from that of the speaker. While most scholarship on “hate speech” notes that there is no single definition of the term, most definitions share a distinctive feature: they only include speech that references an out-group. The range of speech falling within any definition can thus vary depending on factors such as what speech constitutes “assaultive language,” but such vari­ ation is still limited to out-groups that are meant to be protected. For example, Mari J. Matsuda et al., Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (New York: Routledge, 2018); Jeremy Waldron, The Harm in Hate Speech (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). One approach to broadening hate speech protections has thus been to expand understandings of protected groups. This has not typically included members of the dominant in-group, though sometimes concern is raised for attacks on people who warrant protec­ tion such as “human rights defenders.” For example, Nazila Ghanea, “Intersectionality and the Spectrum of Racist Hate Speech: Proposals to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination,” Human Rights Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2013): 935–54. Indeed “hate speech,” along with incitement to genocide, is sometimes said to be an inchoate crime: it can be found to violate international law even absent demonstrable effects. Richard Wilson, Incitement on Trial: Prosecuting Inter­ national Speech Crimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Gregory Gordon, Atrocity Speech Law: Foun­ dation, Fragmentation, Fruition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). For the premise that speech always has multiple functions, see Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (New York: MIT Press and John Wiley, 1960), 350–77. For example, Felix Mukwiza Ndahinda and Aggée Shyaka Mugabe, “Streaming Hate: Exploring the Harm of AntiBanyamulenge and Anti-Tutsi Hate Speech on Congolese Social Media,” Journal of Genocide Research 26, no. 1 (2024): 48–72. The 2023 Sudikoff Seminar, convened by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and focused on social media and mass atrocities, provides another illustration. The seminar paper was thoroughly referenced, addressed multiple forms of content not limited to characterizations of victims, and discussed examples from Myanmar, India, Ethiopia, and Sri Lanka. Yet it only cited two scholarly sources on specific cases, both of which focused on Myanmar and discussed only speech that characterized the victim out-group. Daniel Solomon and Tallan Donine, “Social Media, Mass Atrocities, and Atrocity Prevention,” Sudikoff Interdisciplinary Seminar on Geno­ cide Prevention, Background Paper (US Holocaust Memorial Museum, January 2023), citing Jenifer Whitten-Woodring et al., “Poison If You Don’t Know How to Use It: Facebook, Democracy, and Human Rights in Myanmar,” The Inter­ national Journal of Press/Politics 25, no. 3 (1 July 2020): 407–25; and Jeremy Liebowitz, “Hate Speech, Disinformation, and Political Violence in Myanmar,” in International Conference on Fake News and Elections in Asia (Bangkok: Asia Centre, 2019), 1–16. During the seminar, multiple participants emphasized that scholars must “better address risks posed by social media beyond hate speech.” Donine, “Social Media Platforms, the Risks of Mass Atrocities, and Oppor­ tunities for Atrocity Prevention,” Sudikoff Interdisciplinary Seminar on Genocide Prevention, Rapporteur’s Report (US Holocaust Memorial Museum, April 2023), 3–4. A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2021). Moses further argues that this has encouraged inadequate analyses of mass violence against civilians, including through the tendency to explain perpetrator action as resulting from hatred and irrationality (ibid. 274 and passim). That the Rohingya genocide is similarly understood as simply a “monumental hate crime” (ibid. 42) is illus­ trated by the focus on “hate speech.” It is also illustrated when the existence of widespread and longstanding antiRohingya sentiments is taken as sufficient, on its own, to explain anti-Rohingya violence and, by extension, reject the