The Nazi regime adopted laws and regulations to crush Germany’s independent media, replacing it with state-controlled radio and print media that disseminated hate speech, antisemitic, racist stereotypes, disinformation and lies. The media campaigns contributed significantly to normalizing atrocity crimes. This facilitated the Holocaust the planned and systematic persecution and annihilation of some 6 million Jewish children, women and men, and at least half a million Roma and Sinti, by Nazi Germany and other racist states. The Nazi regime and its racist collaborators violated the human rights of, and committed atrocity crimes against, people with disabilities, Germans of African descent, LGBTQI+ peoples, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, political dissenters and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Holocaust did not start with the gas chambers, but with hate speech against a minority.

In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge movement of Pol Pot led an intense propaganda campaign to mobilize rural parts of the population and seize power. Hateful discourse systematically dubbed intellectuals, opponents and city dwellers, but also Cambodia’s ethnic and religious minorities as the “enemies” of the Cambodian people. It is estimated that 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians died under the Khmer Rouge regime, from 1975 to 1979.

In Rwanda, decades of hate speech exacerbated ethnic tensions by spreading unfounded rumours and dehumanizing ethnic Tutsi citizens. This was bolstered by hate propaganda broadcast by the infamous Radio Libre des Mille Collines, which incited the Hutu majority to kill their fellow Tutsi citizens. During the ensuing 1994 genocide, it is estimated that more than 1 million people were systematically killed in less than three months. The victims ranged from babies to the elderly and were overwhelmingly of Tutsi ethnicity, but also moderate Hutu, Twa and other individuals who opposed the genocide. An estimated 150,000 to 250,000 women were also raped.

See a collection of videos on the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

The enabling role of hatred and disinformation campaigns in inciting and legitimating war crimes has also been established in the Bosnian war (1992–1995). In Serbian majority areas, constant nationalist propaganda through party-controlled media demonized the Bosnian Muslim population, and other groups, as violent fundamentalist enemies plotting against the Serbs. Dissent was also silenced. In July 1995, in just a matter of days, Serbian forces killed 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica, a Muslim enclave in eastern Bosnia and a "safe area" under UN protection. The Bosnian war left more than 100,000 people dead and 20,000 missing. A quarter of a century later, hate speech, the glorification of war criminals and the denial of genocide and other atrocity crimes are still rampant, including in political discourse and in the media, highlighting the “failure to comprehensively confront the past”.

A campaign of hate and misinformation loaded with derogatory and dehumanizing language against the Rohingya Muslim minority of the country has been linked to the commission of grave human rights violations committed in Myanmar, from 2012 to 2017. The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar established by the United Nations Human Rights Council – released a report documenting the widespread hate propaganda led by State officials, politicians, military and religious leaders. It also found systematic atrocities such as killing, rape and gang rape, torture, forced displacement and other grave rights violations against the Rohingya minority. It is estimated that tens of thousands of people have been raped. By August 2018, more than 725,000 Rohingya had fled to Bangladesh – creating the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world.