arXiv (Cornell University) · 2018 · 43 citations · 0 references
Abuse DetectionReligious HateCommunicationVirtual HarassmentHate CrimesCorpus LinguisticsText MiningCensorshipApplied LinguisticsNatural Language ProcessingSocial MediaHate LingoDiscourse AnalysisPolitical CommunicationIndividual VoicesLanguage StudiesContent AnalysisHate SpeechSociolinguisticsLanguage PolicingCyberbullyingFreedom Of SpeechOnline HarassmentTarget-based Linguistic AnalysisArtsLinguistics
Social media enables freedom of expression but also facilitates online harassment, cyberbullying, and hate speech. The study investigates online hate speech by examining its target, distinguishing between directed and generalized forms. The authors conduct a linguistic and psycholinguistic analysis of directed and generalized hate speech to identify distinguishing markers. Directed hate speech is more informal, angrier, and explicitly attacks the target with fewer analytic words and more authority-related words, while generalized hate speech is dominated by religious content, lethal terms, and quantity words, and the analysis offers data‑driven insights for understanding and detecting online hate speech.
While social media empowers freedom of expression and individual voices, it also enables anti-social behavior, online harassment, cyberbullying, and hate speech. In this paper, we deepen our understanding of online hate speech by focusing on a largely neglected but crucial aspect of hate speech -- its target: either "directed" towards a specific person or entity, or "generalized" towards a group of people sharing a common protected characteristic. We perform the first linguistic and psycholinguistic analysis of these two forms of hate speech and reveal the presence of interesting markers that distinguish these types of hate speech. Our analysis reveals that Directed hate speech, in addition to being more personal and directed, is more informal, angrier, and often explicitly attacks the target (via name calling) with fewer analytic words and more words suggesting authority and influence. Generalized hate speech, on the other hand, is dominated by religious hate, is characterized by the use of lethal words such as murder, exterminate, and kill; and quantity words such as million and many. Altogether, our work provides a data-driven analysis of the nuances of online-hate speech that enables not only a deepened understanding of hate speech and its social implications but also its detection.