scholarly journals Hate speech in intercultural encounters

Author(s):  
Anne Birgitta Nielsen ◽  
Ekaterine Pirtskhalava ◽  
Ekaterine Basilaia

The issue of hate speech has been a topic of international debate—most frequently in the domains of law, philosophy and language. Different issues linked to changes in society, ranging from the proliferation of social media, innovation and technology and influx of fake news, disinformation and propaganda to the rise of nationalism, far-right movements, increased cross-border movement of people and transnational business have made studying the conceptual and practical aspects of hate speech in different contexts ever more important. The papers in this issue focus on the sociolinguistic aspects of the use of hate speech and its different variants in online communication, offering a much-needed perspective on how hate speech in digital communication can be identified and tackled. For example, Dr. Manana Ruseishvili and Dr. Rusudan Dolidze analyse hate speech in computer-meditated communication, focusing on the polylogal, asynchronic remarks made by members of the public reacting to articles in online media or press releases about the LGBT pride event planned for June 2019. The research carried out by Lilit Bekaryan explores how hateful posts and comments can start among Facebook users, and studies the language means employed in their design based on data from more than ten open Facebook pages managed by popular Armenian figures, such as media experts, journalists, politicians and bloggers. Dr. Tatjana R. Felberg explores the interconnectedness between impoliteness and hate speech in online comments in Croatia and Serbia by applying impoliteness theory and a critical discourse analysis framework. Her research demonstrates that those who post often fluctuate between hate speech and impoliteness. Dr. Ayunts and Dr. Paronyan provide a comparative analysis of manifestations of hate speech and euphemisms in Armenian and British online media outlets and social sites targeting people's sexual orientation with emphasis on the interconnectedness of hate speech and culture. This issue was prepared as part of the project ‘Intercultural encounters in academia and work places in South Caucasus and Norway’ funded by DIKU, the Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education. The project partner universities are Oslo Metropolitan University, Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Yerevan State University and Khazar University.

Author(s):  
Lilit Bekaryan

Social media networking websites have become platforms where users can not only share their photos, moments of happiness, success stories and best practices, but can also voice their criticism, discontent and negative emotions. It is interesting to follow how something that starts as a mere disagreement or conflict over clashing interests or values can develop into a hateful exchange on Facebook that targets social media users based on their gender, religious belonging, ethnicity, sexual orientation, political convictions etc. The present research explores how hateful posts and comments can start among Facebook users, and studies the language means employed in their design. The factual material was retrieved from more than ten open Facebook pages managed by popular Armenian figures, such as media experts, journalists, politicians and bloggers, in the period 2018–2020. The analysis of hate speech samples extracted from these sources shows that hate speech can find its explicit and implicit reflection in the online communication of Armenian Facebook users, and can be characterised by contextual markers such as invisibility, incitement to violence, invectiveness and immediacy. The language analysis of the posts and comments comprising hate speech has helped to identify language features of hateful comments including informal tone, use of passive voice, abusive and derogatory words, rhetorical or indirectly formed questions, generalisations and labelling.


2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tess Slavíčková ◽  
Peter Zvagulis

This paper describes selected outcomes of media monitoring for anti-minority hate speech in the Czech Republic. In keeping with the agenda of critical discourse analysis, we aim to integrate historical, linguistic and cultural specificities with their linguistic manifestations in news articles about minorities, and here we present findings from a long-term study devoted to tracking xenophobia against two of the main minority groups. The AntiMetrics project, of which the work described here is one part, is designed to detect signs of anti-minority rhetoric in a society, with a view to taking steps to prevent such indicators from developing into more embedded prejudice and ultimately inter-group violence. The paper aims to provide a snapshot of what is a broad, long-term interdisciplinary project. Using a critical discourse toolkit, we analyse a sample news story about the Roma community, and identify a number of discursive and linguistic features that indicate the entrenchment of “new racism” in media at some levels. The toolkit also seeks to go beyond lexical signs to identify more implicit rhetorical devices, such as framing and (de-) contextualization of news events, and to quantify lack of balance in the selection of witnesses and other primary definers. Our ongoing content survey indicates the embedding of linguistic patterns that raise concern about leakage of far right discourse via media into everyday communication.


Author(s):  
Eva Svatoňová

Far-right social movements, whose popularity is on the rise in Europe, are often described as male-dominated organisations. Consequently, masculinity in the context of far-right organisations and the manosphere has received scholarly attention. However, most studies focus on male organisations and male leaders, giving the impression that “masculinist discourses” are reproduced only by men (Kimmel, 2013, 2018; Miller-Idriss, 2018). Yet, it becomes increasingly difficult to continue to ignore the patriarchal discourses of women engaged in activism in far-right organisations. Therefore, this exploratory study focuses on the construction of gender in the online communication of the Czech female organisation Angry Mothers. The study provides a deeper understanding of how women can co-construct the manosphere, which is deemed to be a fundamentally misogynist online space. To answer my research questions: How does the organisation use visual language to construct gender in their online communication? and What types of masculinity/femininity are portrayed as superior and what types of masculinity/femininity are portrayed as subordinate?, I analysed material published on the organisation’s Facebook page using the method of visual analysis (Rose, 2016), informed by Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Wodak & Meyer, 2016). Based on the findings, I argue that the activists’ views presented in their political communication aim to preserve a masculinist, patriarchal structural order in society, despite their self-identification as protectors of women’s rights. However, through their discursive practices, they simultaneously portray women as powerful actors in their traditional gender roles.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-165
Author(s):  
Tina Askanius

This article is based on a case study of the online media practices of the militant neo-Nazi organization the Nordic Resistance Movement, currently the biggest and most active extreme-right actor in Scandinavia. I trace a recent turn to humor, irony, and ambiguity in their online communication and the increasing adaptation of stylistic strategies and visual aesthetics of the Alt-Right inspired by online communities such as 4chan, 8chan, Reddit, and Imgur. Drawing on a visual content analysis of memes ( N = 634) created and circulated by the organization, the analysis explores the place of humor, irony, and ambiguity across these cultural expressions of neo-Nazism and how ideas, symbols, and layers of meaning travel back and forth between neo-Nazi and Alt-right groups within Sweden today.


Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110086
Author(s):  
Imogen Richards ◽  
Maria Rae ◽  
Matteo Vergani ◽  
Callum Jones

A 21st-century growth in prevalence of extreme right-wing nationalism and social conservatism in Australia, Europe, and America, in certain respects belies the positive impacts of online, new, and alternative forms of global media. Cross-national forms of ‘far-right activism’ are unconfined to their host nations; individuals and organisations campaign on the basis of ethno-cultural separatism, while capitalising on internet-based affordances for communication and ideological cross-fertilisation. Right-wing revolutionary ideas disseminated in this media, to this end, embody politico-cultural aims that can only be understood with attention to their philosophical underpinnings. Drawing on a dataset of articles from the pseudo-news websites, XYZ and The Unshackled, this paper investigates the representation of different rightist political philosophical traditions in contemporary Australia-based far-right media. A critical discourse and content analysis reveal XYZ and TU’s engagement with various traditions, from Nietzsche and the Conservative Revolution, to the European New Right and neo-Nazism.


Author(s):  
Patricia Chiril ◽  
Endang Wahyu Pamungkas ◽  
Farah Benamara ◽  
Véronique Moriceau ◽  
Viviana Patti

AbstractHate Speech and harassment are widespread in online communication, due to users' freedom and anonymity and the lack of regulation provided by social media platforms. Hate speech is topically focused (misogyny, sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc.), and each specific manifestation of hate speech targets different vulnerable groups based on characteristics such as gender (misogyny, sexism), ethnicity, race, religion (xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia), sexual orientation (homophobia), and so on. Most automatic hate speech detection approaches cast the problem into a binary classification task without addressing either the topical focus or the target-oriented nature of hate speech. In this paper, we propose to tackle, for the first time, hate speech detection from a multi-target perspective. We leverage manually annotated datasets, to investigate the problem of transferring knowledge from different datasets with different topical focuses and targets. Our contribution is threefold: (1) we explore the ability of hate speech detection models to capture common properties from topic-generic datasets and transfer this knowledge to recognize specific manifestations of hate speech; (2) we experiment with the development of models to detect both topics (racism, xenophobia, sexism, misogyny) and hate speech targets, going beyond standard binary classification, to investigate how to detect hate speech at a finer level of granularity and how to transfer knowledge across different topics and targets; and (3) we study the impact of affective knowledge encoded in sentic computing resources (SenticNet, EmoSenticNet) and in semantically structured hate lexicons (HurtLex) in determining specific manifestations of hate speech. We experimented with different neural models including multitask approaches. Our study shows that: (1) training a model on a combination of several (training sets from several) topic-specific datasets is more effective than training a model on a topic-generic dataset; (2) the multi-task approach outperforms a single-task model when detecting both the hatefulness of a tweet and its topical focus in the context of a multi-label classification approach; and (3) the models incorporating EmoSenticNet emotions, the first level emotions of SenticNet, a blend of SenticNet and EmoSenticNet emotions or affective features based on Hurtlex, obtained the best results. Our results demonstrate that multi-target hate speech detection from existing datasets is feasible, which is a first step towards hate speech detection for a specific topic/target when dedicated annotated data are missing. Moreover, we prove that domain-independent affective knowledge, injected into our models, helps finer-grained hate speech detection.


Author(s):  
Felix Victor Münch ◽  
Luca Rossi

Global political developments – such as Brexit, climate change, or forced migration – are entangled with communication that transcends national publics. Meanwhile, the EU’s integrity suffers, also due to polarised online discourses, which are sometimes actively manipulated. Therefore, an overview of online communication beyond language barriers is essential. However, whether and how online media create a global space that sustains deliberation of national and global interests by citizens, remains understudied. We approach this problem by exploring relations between the Italian and German Twittersphere, while asking: 1) What is the macrostructure of this bilingual network? 2) Are there bridges between these language communities in the form of single accounts and how can they be described? 3) Are there bridges in the form of groups and what are they tweeting about? We build on an innovative network crawling strategy for language-based Twitter follow networks. We developed it further to combine strengths of rank degree, snowball, and forest fire sampling. Thereby, we collect a network sample of the most central accounts in the Italian-German Twittersphere. Preliminary results suggest a bridging quality of soccer and connections between political clusters of both languages by EU politicians. Furthermore, larger network clusters connect mainly with one linguistic domain while smaller communities show a bridging behaviour. The final paper will present results of months of data collection, focusing on the relation between topics discussed within clusters and their connectivity. While it focuses on the German-Italian Twittersphere, our methods open up new avenues of enquiry regarding multi-language public spheres.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manoel Horta Ribeiro ◽  
Virgílio A. F. Almeida ◽  
Wagner Meira Jr

The popularization of Online Social Networks has changed the dynamics of content creation and consumption. In this setting, society has witnessed an amplification in phenomena such as misinformation and hate speech. This dissertation studies these issues through the lens of users. In three case studies in social networks, we: (i) provide insight on how the perception of what is misinformation is altered by political opinion; (ii) propose a methodology to study hate speech on a user-level, showing that the network structure of users can improve the detection of the phenomenon; (iii) characterize user radicalization in far-right channels on YouTube through time, showing a growing migration towards the consumption of extreme content in the platform.


Diksi ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-188
Author(s):  
Ikha Adhi Wijaya ◽  
Annas Annas ◽  
Sumarlam Sumarlam

(Title: The Evaluation of Trump’s Political Perspectives at The  “Save America Rally”). This paper explores Trump speech in online media CBC news entitled “Live Coverage: Protesters Swarm Capitol, Abruptly Halting Electoral Vote Count” in the point of view of discourse analysis. This research belongs to qualitative research. The method used to analyze is distributional and referential method. It analyzed Trump ideology’s Perspectives through structure manifested by Emotive words, phrases, sentences from his speech, specifically it explored from critical discourse analysis conducted by Teun A .Van Dijk.  It resulted and indicated that Trump conveyed his political will by protesting the result of the ballots. He said there was fraud in the middle of the election. In fact, instead of protesting the election, he also conveyed the autocritics towards the government (himself). Key Words:  speech, Trumps, critical discourse analysis, ideology


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