group targeted. This adheres to what Foxman and Wolf believe to be a decline in standards of civility triggered by the uncontrolled flow of content on the internet.102 Measuring the Danger of Wirathu’s Hate Speech Now we have discussed how harmful hate speech can be in society, and the role it can play in dividing communities within it, I will suggest a useful method that can be used to judge the danger of certain hate speech. Susan Besesch, senior fellow at World Policy Institute, places emphasis on evaluative monitoring as a means to prevent group violence in a report titled: Dangerous Speech: A Proposal to Prevent Group Violence (2012). She defines five variables which affect the dangerousness of hate speech: 1. a powerful speaker with a high degree of influence over the audience, 2. the audience has grievances and fear that the speaker can cultivate, 3. a speech act that is clearly understood as a call to violence, 4. a social or historical context that is propitious for violence, for any of a variety of reasons, including longstanding competition between groups for resources, lack of efforts to solve grievances, or previous episodes of violence, 5. a means of dissemination that is influential in itself, for example because it is the sole or primary source of news for the relevant audience.103 The most dangerous speech act, Benesch explains, is one for which all five variables are maximised. We can apply this method of evaluation to the hate speech spoken by Wirathu and the anti-Muslim nationalist movement in Myanmar, and observe relations to all five points. 102 Foxman and Wolf, p.33. 103 Benesch, S., (2012) ‘Dangerous Speech: A Proposal to Prevent Group Violence’, World Policy Institute, available at: http://www.worldpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Dangerous%20Speech%20Guidelines%20Benesch%2 0January%202012.pdf [November 2015], p.2. - 44 -