MAPPING MINORITIES’ VULNERABILITY TO HATE SPEECH AND DENATIONALISATION WITH A FOCUS ON EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA KATALIN BERÉNYI * This paper explores whether minority groups are more vulnerable to hate speech, human rights violations, denationalisation and mass atrocities in light of the deliberate lack of state protection through the lens of recent incidents in East and Southeast Asia. The paper also examines the role of social media giant Facebook in spreading hate speech online and whether it may have had any liabilities in relation to the hateful posts that were spread online against the Rohingyas in Myanmar and, more recently, against the Muslim minorities living in the State of Assam in India. The paper concludes by (1) advising policy-makers to adopt and implement strong anti-hate speech laws, clearly criminalising both online and offline hate speech on the national level, as well as to (2) refrain from denationalising minority groups leaving them stateless or at the risk of statelessness and thus avoid instrumentalising nationality for political gains. TABLE OF CONTENTS I II III IV V Introduction............................................................................................................... 5 Statelessness: A Minority Issue Intertwined with Hate Speech? .............................. 9 Ethnic discrimination lies at the core of statelessness in Asia ................................ 11 Ethnic Koreans Subject to Mass Denationalisation and Hate Speech in Japan ...... 12 Hate Speech against the Stateless Rohingya Facilitated by Facebook: Lessons Learned? ................................................................................................................. 14 VI Hate Speech against Minorities in the State of Assam, India: Lessons Ignored ..... 19 VII Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 22 I INTRODUCTION My community too fell victim to social media, as Facebook allowed the Burmese nationalists to spread their toxic and violent hate against us until it was too late for too many. My message to the social media platforms is ‘Stop allowing malicious actors to weaponize tools of connection into tools of hate. Learn from your mistakes. Act now.’ 1 — Tun Khun, President of Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK June, 2019 * 1 PhD. Statelessness Consultant, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (‘UNHCR’). The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not attributable to UNHCR. Quoted in Megaphone for Hate: Disinformation and Hate Speech on Facebook during Assam’s Citizenship Count (Report, AVAAZ October 2019) 3 <https://avaazpress.s3.amazonaws.com/FINALFacebook%20in%20Assam_Megaphone%20for%20hate%20-%20Compressed%20(1).pdf> (‘Megaphone for Hate’).