Article published in:
(Im)politeness and Moral Order in Online Interactions
Edited by Chaoqun Xie
[Internet Pragmatics 1:2] 2018
► pp. 329–351

Impoliteness online

Hate speech in online interactions

| University of Innsbruck

This paper provides an overview of the strategies and techniques of hate speech in online discourse (on online discourse or computer-mediated communication in general cf. e.g., Schwarzhaupt-Scholz 2004; Schmidt 2013; Dittler and Hoyer 2014; Seargeant and Tagg 2014). Based on a collection of online texts belonging to different genres (discussion forums, blogs, social media, tweets, homepages), this paper will provide a qualitative analysis of destructively impolite utterances in online interactions. This analysis will make use of the standard typologies of impoliteness and their recent extensions (such as Culpeper 1996, 2005, 2011; Kienpointner 1997, 2008; Kleinke and Bös 2015), but some modifications and elaborations of these typologies will also be taken into account. Moreover, social, cultural and political reasons for the recent dramatic increase in hate speech in online interactions will be explored. Finally, the problem of how to deal with this destructive use of language will be briefly discussed and some possible solutions will be suggested (cf. Banks 2010).

Keywords: hate, hate speech, online impoliteness, intergroup rudeness, racism, moral order
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Analysis of examples
  • 3.Reasons for and strategies against hate speech
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 January 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00015.kie
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