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Negotiating Hate and Conflict in Online Comments: Evidence from the NETLANG Corpus

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Hate Speech in Social Media

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Abstract

The chapter seeks to identify how conflict is negotiated within the architecture of discussion forums on online news sites. First, it delimits the relation between the cluster of related concepts ranging from anti-social discourse, hate and aggressive speech, to conflict talk. It adopts a sociopragmatic conception of conflict talk as a multi-dimensional phenomenon with several key elements (structure, form, interaction, meaning) and draws on a framework of discursive strategies that serve to express conflict. Using data on body shaming and physical impairments from the netlang corpus, it documents how commenters deploy conflicting representations, enter into extended conflictual discussions and escalate the mutual conflict, while gradually shifting from idea-oriented to person-oriented strategies. The findings indicate, among other aspects, that conflict in talk can be accompanied by strategies seeking to delegitimise the other, while it simultaneously solidifies the unity of the ingroup.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Source: transparency.fb.com/cs-cz/policies/community-standards/hate-speech. Last accessed on 17 October 2022.

  2. 2.

    Millar takes the linear model over from The Council of Europe’s publication Bookmarks: A manual for combatting hate speech online through human rights education (p. 168).

  3. 3.

    The project title is “The Language of Cyberbullying: Forms and Mechanisms of Online Prejudice and Discrimination in Annotated Comparable Corpora of Portuguese and English”. The project and the corpus are run by the University of Minho, Portugal, and sponsored by FCT (PTDC/LLT-LIN/29304/2017).

  4. 4.

    A decision was made to exclude the article that was most commented on (2019 Election live, with 514 comments), because its subject matter was political rather than related to body politics. While some body shaming was present in the comments, the vast majority of the comments deal with other issues that body shaming/physical identity.

  5. 5.

    The coding of the examples indicates the order of the comment in the interaction; C-1-4, for instance, designates a fourth comment submitted in response to the first comment on the news article.

  6. 6.

    “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows” (1 Timothy 6:10).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Jan Chovanec

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  1. Jan Chovanec
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Correspondence to Jan Chovanec .

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  1. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Isabel Ermida

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Chovanec, J. (2023). Negotiating Hate and Conflict in Online Comments: Evidence from the NETLANG Corpus. In: Ermida, I. (eds) Hate Speech in Social Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38248-2_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38248-2_12

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