Social Media Misconduct Dismissals in South Africa: Forms of Hate Speech in First-Instance Employment Decisions

This thesis examines what first-instance social media misconduct dismissals decisions reveal about hate speech in contemporary South African workspaces. It finds racialised hate to be a significant form of hate speech that materialises in textual (words), non-textual (images) and meta-textual modes within social media discourse in contemporary South African workspaces. In doing so, this thesis expands understanding the nexus between social media, employment law and the modes of racialised meaning-making circulating in online workspaces in South Africa, thereby contributing towards ‘de-westernising’ social media dismissal scholarship by extending its horizons to the context of the Sub-Saharan Global South.