Serhan & Elareshi – University Students’ Awareness of Social Media Use and Hate Speech in Jordan © 2019 International Journal of Cyber Criminology (Diamond Open Access Journal). Under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License 548 Copyright © 2019 International Journal of Cyber Criminology – ISSN: 0974–2891 July – December 2019. Vol. 13(2): 548–563. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3709236 Publisher & Editor-in-Chief – K. Jaishankar / Open Access (Authors / Readers No Pay Journal). This is a Diamond Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0) License , which permits unrestricted non-commercial use , distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. University Students’ Awareness of Social Media Use and Hate Speech in Jordan Faisal al Serhan & Mokhtar Elareshi Al Ain University, United Arab Emirates (UAE) Abstract The Internet’s social network is an integral part of our daily lives, easily facilitating communication and information exchange. The study focuses on online “hate speech” content that becomes a global matter by asking university social-media users in Jordan about their perceptions and determining how such platforms influence users’ attitudes and feelings of safety when dealing with news-content “hate speech”. Survey-based results (n = 150) revealed that “hate speech” was easily identified by respondents because they were exposed to it. Respondents were able to alert their friends and family members about such speech. Smart devices were seen as commonly used for spreading hate speech. More strategies for confronting such speech were discussed. ________________________________________________________________________ Keywords: Hate Speech, Social-Media Sites, Middle East, Strategies of Confrontation, Jordan. Introduction The Internet has become a ubiquitous platform allowing online users to search/find news and information easily, communicate at all levels via mobile devices and entertain, as well as engage with, other like-minded people (those who do or do not share the same views or values) in different manners. These activities are seen as a positive side of Internet use. The other side, however, is that some users, for differing reasons, misuse this technology and use it to harm or affect “others” by creating and spreading content called “hate speech” which requires a high level of authorisation to monitor and tackle (eMORE, 2017; Gunter & Elareshi, 2016; Poushter, Bishop, & Chwe, 2018). This particularly affects those using leading social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The term “hate speech” is defined as expressions that advocate incitement to harm “others” (Awan, 2016) and are seen as representing a threat, or a cause of damage, to individuals’ lives and as increasing the sense of “fear in entire communities” (eMORE, 2017, p. 7). Gitari et al. (2015, p. 215) consider such content as “offensive and threatening language that targets certain groups of people based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, colour or gender”. Such content usually emanates from supposedly rival groups or different ethnic groups. Kowalski et al. (2012) indicate that some Internet users