A Critical Discourse-Analytic Perspective of Hate Speech Contours in Online Posts and Comments about Migrants
(2021) Linguistic and Social Aspects of Hate Speech in Modern Societies — Location: Odense (22.March.2021)
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- to which the distinction between personal attitudes and perceived group norms can be useful in the analysis of communication patterns related to the migration issue. The research revealed that there is a divergence between Europeans’ attitudes towards the migration issue and their perception of group norms towards the issue. Such a discrepancy shapes their speaking-out behaviours, in particular, resistance or conformity to the public debate about this topic. The perception of a positive group norm towards migration is often illustrated online by strong reactions of conformity, despair and call to action, on the one hand, and, by reactions of hate speech, rejection and resistance to migrants, on the other. This research investigates the second type of reactions through a critical discourse analytic approach (Dijk, 2000; Griebel and Vollmann, 2019; Tartory, 2020) aiming at profiling the contours of hate speech: indeed, there is a continuum of psychosocial reactions translated in (comments to) online posts about migration, from fear and disinformation to hatred, discrimination and identity attack. In this context, migration must be understood in its broad sense, including economic migration, refugees, asylum seekers, etc. We will therefore start by questioning the accuracy of traditional definitions of (online) hate speech (Brown, 2017 & 2018; Sellars, 2016) to achieve a more nuanced definition, based on different discourses and migration types. If we were taking into account the definition of hate speech as discourse “involving the denigration, harassment, exclusion, and advocacy of violence against specific groups on the basis of assigned or selected characteristics” (Wachs S. et Wright MF., 2018: 1), one could question the adequacy of each criteria in the definition of hate speech, in particular compared to harmful or extreme speech (Gagliardone, 2019). We will also consider the nature of each criteria. Is a denigration-only speech (without violence) still hate speech? Is the repetition of speech always harassment, e.g., when it is the repetition of the same message? What are the differences and borders between fear and exclusion as reflected in the vocabulary? Is there a variation in the discriminatory lexicon depending on the migration type addressed in online posts? Which arguments, between race, skin color, national and ethnic origin, and religion, are used to discriminate different types of migrants? We will also look into the different identities that are shaped through the discourse types. We know that social networks foster a particular online identity by building and mixing offline identity, disinhibition, positive self-image exposition and social approval pursuit (Neller, 2018; Hrdina, 2016; Josey, 2010; Granjon and Denouël, 2010). This second part of our research aims to answer the following research questions: Are real haters highly recognizable in this range of profiles? What are their specific vocabulary and turn-taking strategies? Are other web users reacting to their discourse with extreme arguments themselves? Do they try to moderate or nuance it or are they only bystanders giving their opinion? Is indirect covert hate speech (Baumgarten et al. 2019) still hate speech? Do certain social media platforms constitute spaces for multisource soliloquy interventions without proper conversation about migration? Our corpus will consist of two sub-corpora from two different social medias: (1) Twitter: an initial corpus of forty thousand posts have been collected, based on a selection of hashtags related to migration and following a collection protocol (designed in the previous European project), that enables to represent a national population’s tweets ; (2) Instagram: we gathered five thousand posts and their comments, following the collection methodology proposed by Ping et al. (2018). These two corpora were chosen for their variation in terms of targeted users and in terms of media types (text and image). In the framework of this research, both English and French messages have been analysed in a selection of Belgian, French and Norwegian messages on Twitter and Instagram. The analytical approach combines a qualitative analysis of conversations and a quantitative corpus analysis of the messages, as recommended by Haider (2019).
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Cougnon, L.-A. (2021). A Critical Discourse-Analytic Perspective of Hate Speech Contours in Online Posts and Comments about Migrants. Linguistic and Social Aspects of Hate Speech in Modern Societies, Odense. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/104397