Reported user‐generated online hate speech : the ecosystem, frames, and ideologies

Šori, Iztok (author), Vehovar, Vasja (author)

The spread of hate speech challenges the health of democracy and media systems in contemporary societies. This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of user‐generated online hate speech reported by Internet users to national monitoring organizations, in particular its ‘ecosystem‘, discursive elements, and links to political discourses. First, we analyzed the main characteristics of the reported statements (source, removal rate, and targets) to reveal the media and political context of reported user‐generated online hate speech. Next, we focused on hate speech statements against migrants and analyzed their discursive elements with the method of critical frame analysis (frames, actors, metaphors, and references) to understand the corresponding discourse. The main discursive feature of these statements is the prognosis, which calls for death and violence, so we could label this communication as ‘executive speech.’ Other key features are references to weapons and Nazi crimes from WWII, indicating the authors’ extreme‐right ideological convictions, and the metaphors, employed to provoke disgust from migrants, present them as culturally inferior and raise fears about their supposed violent behavior. The corresponding diagnoses frame migrants as a threat in a similar way to populist political discourses of othering and complement these in providing ‘final’ solutions in prognoses.

• Language: English
• Keywords: user‐generated online hate speech, reported hate speech, frame analysis, Nazi ideology
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FDV - Faculty of Social Sciences
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Publication date: 19.08.2022
• Year: 2022
• Number of pages: Str. 1-19
• Numbering: Vol. 11, iss. 8
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-138828
• UDC: 343.63:004.738.5
• ISSN on article: 2076-0760
• DOI: 10.3390/socsci11080375
• COBISS.SI-ID: 118706947
• Publication date in RUL: 22.08.2022

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Social sciences
• Shortened title: Soc. sci.
• Publisher: MDPI
• ISSN: 2076-0760
• COBISS.SI-ID: 32378973

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.
• Licensing start date: 22.08.2022