Cover not available
Article published In:
Hate speech: Definitions, interpretations and practices
Edited by Fabienne H. Baider, Sharon Millar and Stavros Assimakopoulos
[Pragmatics and Society 11:2] 2020
► pp. 196–217

Pragmatics lost?

Overview, synthesis and proposition in defining online hate speech

| University of Cyprus
This article argues for a definition of online hate speech as a contextualised speech act that is part of a social process of alienation. It suggests that hate speech comes in degrees, is contextual, involves already existing power dynamics, and ‘others’ its targets by creating in/out groups. I first review the various stances towards understanding the phenomenon of online hate speech, including approaches that focus on online hate speech as an interaction shaped by its medium, while also emphasizing the need to consider the role of implicatures in speech acts when defining hate speech. Second, I argue that the relationality of online speech implies that any message is embedded in idiosyncratic socio-cultural norms, and that therefore a ‘one size fits all’ definition of hate speech is elusive. I conclude by suggesting that contextualized hate speech is embedded in a social process of alienation and should be understood as a continuum.
Keywords: covert hate speech, alienating speech, online hate speech, societal norms, homophobia, sexism, counter-narrative
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Defining online hate speech
    • 2.1The role of the medium in online hate speech
    • 2.2Defining online hate speech with a focus on the lexicon
    • 2.3Defining hate speech by the illocutionary force of the message
  • 3.Contextualising hate speech
    • 3.1Evaluating hate speech by the implicatures of the message
    • 3.2Conversational and community norms defining hate speech
    • 3.3Integrating the relational dimension in the assessment of hate speech
  • 4.Defining and understanding hate speech as a domination process
    • 4.1Hate speech as engraining power relationships
    • 4.2Protected characteristics and hate speech
    • 4.3Hate speech as a social act in the alienation process
  • 5.Conclusion: Preventing hate speech
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 13 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.20004.bai
References (76)
References
Adelman, Howard. 2008. “Theories of Genocide: The Case of Rwanda.” In Explaining the Breakdown of Ethnic Relations: Why Neighbours Kill, ed. by Victoria Esses, and Richard A. Vernon. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Allport, Gordon W. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
Angermuller, Johannes. 2018. “Truth after Post-truth: For a Strong Programme in Discourse Studies.” Palgrave Communications 4 (30): 1–8. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baider, Fabienne. 2013. “The Saliency Hypothesis: Affects and Emotions.” In Research Trends in Intercultural Pragmatics, ed. by Istvan Kecskes and Jesus Romero-Trillo, 7–25. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
. 2017. “Thinking globally, acting locally: Mainstream supremacist concepts within a local socio-historical context.” Journal of Aggression Language and Conflict 5 (2): 178–204. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2019. “Le discours de haine dissimulée: le mépris pour humilier.” Déviance et société 3 (43): 359–387. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baider, Fabienne, and Monika Kopytowska. 2017. “Conceptualising the Other: Online Discourses on the Current Refugee Crisis in Cyprus and in Poland.” Łódź Papers in Pragmatics 13 (2): 203–233.Google Scholar
Braddock, Kurth, and John Horgan. 2015. “Towards a Guide for Constructing and Disseminating Counter-narratives to Reduce Support for Terrorism.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 39 (5): 381–404. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Braddock, Kurth, and James Price Dillard. 2016. “Meta-analytic evidence for the persuasive effect of narratives on beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors.” Communication Monographs 83 (4): 446–467, DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brewer, Marilynn. 1999. “The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love and Outgroup Hate?” Journal of Social Issues 5531: 429–444. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Alexander. 2015. Hate Speech Law: A Philosophical Examination. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2018. “What is so special about online (as compared to offline) hate speech?” Ethnicities 18 (3): 297–326. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chakraborti, Neil. 2015. “Re-thinking Hate Crime: Fresh Challenges for Policy and Practice.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 30 (10): 1738–1754. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cheng, Justin, Michael Bernstein, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. “Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions.” In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 1217–1230. New York: ACM. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chiluwa, Innocent. 2015. “Radicalist Discourse: A Study of the Stances of Nigeria’s Boko Haram and Somalia’s Al Shabaab on Twitter.” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 10 (2): 214–235. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Citron, Danielle Keats. 2014. Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cohen-Almagor, Raphael. 2015. Confronting the Internet’s Dark Side: Moral and Social Responsibility on the Free Highway. New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017. “Why confronting the Internet’s dark side?” Philosophia 451: 919–929. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Colomb, Gregory C., and Joyce A. Simutis. 1996. “Visible Conversation and Academic Inquiry: CMC in a Cultural Diverse Classroom.” In Computer-mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. by Suzan C. Herring, 203–222. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Council of the European Union. 2008. Council framework decision 2008/913/jha of 28 November 2008 on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law. [URL]
De Smedt, Tom, Guy De Pauw, and Pieter Van Ostaeyen. 2018. “Automatic Detection of Online Jihadist Hate Speech.” CLiPS Technical Report Series 71: 1–31. [URL]
Dubrovsky, Vitaly J., Sara Kiesler, and Beheruz N. Sethna. 1991. “The Equalization Phenomenon: Status Effects in Computer-mediated and Face-to-face Decision Making Groups.” Human-Computer Interaction 6 (2): 119–146. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ess, Charles, and Fay Sudweeks. 2006. “Culture and Computer-mediated Communication: Toward New Understandings.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 111: 179–191. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gadd, David. 2009. “Aggravating Racism and Elusive Motivation.” British Journal of Criminology 491: 755–771. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gagliardone, Iginio, Alisha Patel, and Matti Pohjonen. 2014. Mapping and Analysing Hate Speech Online. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garland, Jon. 2010. “Victimization of Goths and the Boundaries of Hate Crime.” In From Hate Crime: Concepts, Policy, Future Directions, ed. by Neil Chakraborti, 40–57. London: Willan Publishing.Google Scholar
Garland, Jon, and Neil Chakraborti. 2012. “Divided by a common concept? Assessing the implications of different conceptualizations of hate crime in the European Union.” European Journal of Criminology 9 (1): 38–51. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fein, Helen. 1979. Accounting for Genocide. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
. 1993. Genocide: A Sociological Perspective. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Fortuna, Paula. 2017. “Automatic Detection of Hate Speech in Text: An Overview of the Topic and Dataset Annotation with Hierarchical Classes.” Master’s thesis, University of Porto. [URL]
Hansen, Miriam, Sabine Fabriz, and Sebastian Stehle. 2015. “Cultural Cues in Students’ Computer-mediated Communication: Influences on E-mail Style, Perception of the Sender, and Willingness to help.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 201: 278–294. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hansen, Miriam, and Regina Jucks. 2014. “Computer-mediated Communication in Psychology Teaching: Influence of Culture on E-mail Content and on Appraisal.” Psychology Learning and Teaching 131: 218–232. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hardacker, Claire. 2010. “Trolling in Asynchronous Computer Mediated Communication: From User Discussions to Academic Definitions.” Journal of Politeness Research 6 (2): 215–242.Google Scholar
Herring, Susan, Kirk Job-Sluder, Rebecca Scheckler, and Sasha Barab. 2002. “Searching for Safety Online: Managing ‘Trolling’ in a Feminist Forum.” Information Society 1851: 371–384. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Iganski, Paul. 2018. Hate Crime. The Need to Strengthen ‘Civil Courage.’ Belfast: NIACRO.Google Scholar
Jane, Emma A. 2014. “‘Your a Ugly, Whorish, Slut’: Understanding E-bile.” Feminist Media Studies 1441: 531–546. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kakava, Christina. 2001. “Language and Conflict.” In Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi Hamilton, 650–670. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Kiesler, Sara, Jane Seigel, and Timothy McGuire. 1984. “Social Psychological Aspects of Computer-mediated Communication.” American Psychologist 39 (10): 1123–1134. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kiesler, Sara, David Zubrow, Anne Marie Moses, and Valerie Geller. 1985. “Affect in Computer-mediated Communication: An Experiment in Synchronous Terminal-to-Terminal Discussion.” Human Computer Interaction 11: 77–104. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Langton, Rae. 2018. “The Authority of Hate Speech.” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law, 31, ed. by John Gardner, Leslie Green, and Brian Leiter, 123–152. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lawrence, Frederick M. 1999. Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes under American Law. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lea, Martin, Tim O’Shea, Pat Fung, and Russell Spears. 1992. “Flaming in Computer-mediated Communication: Observations, Explanations, Implications.” In Contexts of Computer Mediated Communication, ed. by Martin Lea, 89–112. New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf.Google Scholar
Lea, Martin, Russell Spears, and Daphne De Groot. 2001. “Knowing Me, Knowing You: Anonymity Effects on Social Identity Processes within Groups.” Personality and Social Psychology Behavior 27 (5): 526–537. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leets, Laura. 2002. “Experiencing Hate Speech: Perceptions and Responses to Anti-semitism and Antigay Speech.” Journal of Social Issues 58 (2): 341–361. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara. 2017. “Incivility and Confrontation in Online Conflict Discourses”. Łódź Papers in Pragmatics 13 (2): 347–363. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lillian, Donna. 2007. “A Thorn by any Other Name: Sexist Discourse as Hate Speech.” Discourse and Society 1861: 719–740. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ludz, Peter C. 1976. “Alienation as a Concept in the Social Sciences.” In Theories of Alienation, ed. by R. Felix Geyer and David R. Schweitzer, 3–37. Leiden: H.E. Stenfert Kroese. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matsuda, Mari. 1989. “Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim’s Story.” Michigan Law Review 87 (8): 2320–2381. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marmor, Andrei. 2008. “The Pragmatics of Legal Language. ” Ratio Juris 21 (4): 423–452. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McGowan, Mary-Kate. 2009. “Oppressive Speech.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (3): 389–407. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCormick, Naomi B., and John W. McCormick. 1992. “Computer Friends and Foes: Content of Undergraduates’ Electronic Mail”. Computers in Human Behavior 81: 379–405. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mukimbiri, Jean. 2005. “The Seven Stages of the Rwandan Genocide.” Journal of International Criminal Justice 31: 823–836. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Musolff, Andreas. 2007. “Which Role do Metaphors Play in Racial Prejudice? The function of anti-Semitic imagery in Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf.’” Patterns of Prejudice 41 (1): 21–44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Olsen, Frances. 2018. “Pragmatic Interpretation by Judges: Constrained Performatives and the Deployment of Gender Bias.” In The Pragmatic Turn in Law, ed. by Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein, 205–232. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
O’Sullivan, Patrick, and Andrew J. Flanagin. 2003. “Reconceptualizing ‘Flaming’ and Other Problematic Messages.” New Media and Society 511: 69–94. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pohjonen, Matti and Sahana Udupa. 2017. “Extreme Speech Online: An Anthropological Critique of Hate Speech Debates.” International Journal of Communication 111: 1173–1191.Google Scholar
Postmes, Tom, Russel Spears, and Martin Lea. 2000. “The Formation of Group Norms in Computer-mediated Communication.” Human Communication Research 26 (3): 341–371. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Richardson-Self, Louise. 2018. “Woman-hating: On Misogyny, Sexism, and Hate speech.” Hypatia 33 (2): 256–272. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Roulstone, Alan, Pam Thomas, and Susie Balderston. 2011. “Between hate and vulnerability: Unpacking the British criminal justice system’s construction of disablist hate crime.” Disability and Society 26(3): 351–364. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sbisà, Marina. 2001. “Illocutionary Force and Degrees of Strength in Language Use.” Journal of Pragmatics 331: 1791–1814. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schabas, William. 2000. “Hate Speech in Rwanda: The Road to Genocide.” McGill Law Journal 461: 141–171.Google Scholar
Schmidt, Anna, and Michael Wiegand. 2017. “A Survey on Hate Speech Detection using Natural Language Processing.” Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media, 1–10, DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sinclair, M. B. W. 1985. “Law and Language: The Role of Pragmatics in Statutory Interpretation.” University of Pittsburgh Law Review 461: 373–420.Google Scholar
Thompsen, Philip A. 1996. “What’s Fueling the Flames in Cyberspace: A Social Influence Model.” In Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, ed. by Lance Strate, Ronald Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson, 297–315. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press.Google Scholar
Timmermann, Wibke. 2008. “Counteracting Hate Speech as a Way of Preventing Genocidal Violence.” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 3 (3), Article 8. [URL]. DOI logo
Tsesis, Alexander. 2002. Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way for Harmful Social Movements. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
. 2013. “Inflammatory Speech: Offense Versus Incitement.” Minnesota Law Review 971: 101–152.Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun. 1998. Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Waller, James E. 2002. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Waldron, Jeremy. 2012. The Harm in Hate Speech. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walther, Joseph B., Jeffery F. Anderson, and David W. Park. 1994. “Interpersonal Effects in Computer-mediated Communication: A Meta-analysis of Social and Antisocial communication.” Communication Research 2141: 460–487. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Warner, William, and Julia Hirschberg. 2012. “Detecting Hate Speech on the World Wide Web.” In LSM’12: Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language in Social Media, 19–26. Stroudsburg, Penn.: ACL.Google Scholar
Weisburd, Steven Bennett, and Brian Levin. 1994. “On the Basis of Sex, Recognizing Gender Based Bias Crimes.” Stanford Law and Policy Review 7 (2): 21–47.Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1999. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Yus, Francisco. 2011. Cyberpragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zhang, Ziqi, David Robinson, and Jonathan Tepper. 2018. “Detecting Hate Speech on Twitter Using a Convolution-GRU Based Deep Neural Network.” In ESWC 2018: The Semantic Web, ed. by Aldo Gangemi, Roberto Navigli, Maria-Esther Vidal, Pascal Hitzler, Raphaël Troncy, Laura Hollink, Anna Tordai, and Mehwish Alam, 745–760. Cham: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (16)

Cited by 16 other publications

Andersson, Marta
2024. The language of threat. Pragmatics and Society DOI logo
Carvalho, Paula, Danielle Caled, Cláudia Silva, Fernando Batista & Ricardo Ribeiro
2024. The expression of hate speech against Afro-descendant, Roma, and LGBTQ+ communities in YouTube comments. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 12:2 ► pp. 171 ff. DOI logo
Oehmer-Pedrazzi, Franziska & Stefano Pedrazzi
2024. “An image hurts more than 1000 words?”. Communications 49:3 ► pp. 421 ff. DOI logo
Ramos, Gil, Fernando Batista, Ricardo Ribeiro, Pedro Fialho, Sérgio Moro, António Fonseca, Rita Guerra, Paula Carvalho, Catarina Marques & Cláudia Silva
2024. Leveraging Transfer Learning for Hate Speech Detection in Portuguese Social Media Posts. IEEE Access 12 ► pp. 101374 ff. DOI logo
Schäfer, Saskia
2024. Political homophobia. Journal of Language and Politics 23:6 ► pp. 808 ff. DOI logo
Baider, Fabienne & Anna Bobori
2023. Online Reactions to the #MeToo Movement. Sextant :39 ► pp. 59 ff. DOI logo
Barth, Niklas, Elke Wagner, Philipp Raab & Björn Wiegärtner
2023. Contextures of hate: Towards a systems theory of hate communication on social media platforms. The Communication Review 26:3 ► pp. 209 ff. DOI logo
Chovanec, Jan
2023. Negotiating Hate and Conflict in Online Comments: Evidence from the NETLANG Corpus. In Hate Speech in Social Media, ► pp. 341 ff. DOI logo
Ermida, Isabel
2023. Distinguishing Online Hate Speech from Aggressive Speech: A Five-Factor Annotation Model. In Hate Speech in Social Media, ► pp. 35 ff. DOI logo
Faria, Rita
2023. Stance-Taking and Gender: Hateful Representations of Portuguese Women Public Figures in the NETLANG Corpus. In Hate Speech in Social Media, ► pp. 311 ff. DOI logo
Parker, Sara & Derek Ruths
2023. Is hate speech detection the solution the world wants?. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120:10 DOI logo
Parvaresh, Vahid
2023. Covertly communicated hate speech: A corpus-assisted pragmatic study. Journal of Pragmatics 205 ► pp. 63 ff. DOI logo
Baider, Fabienne
2022. Covert Hate Speech, Conspiracy Theory and Anti-semitism: Linguistic Analysis Versus Legal Judgement. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 35:6 ► pp. 2347 ff. DOI logo
Baider, Fabienne
2023. Accountability Issues, Online Covert Hate Speech, and the Efficacy of Counter‐Speech. Politics and Governance 11:2 DOI logo
Lee, Carmen
2022. Chapter 10. COVID-19 conspiracy theories as affective discourse. In Conspiracy Theory Discourses [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 98], ► pp. 215 ff. DOI logo
Baider, Fabienne H. & Lorella Sini
2021. Le complotisme « transnational » et le discours de haine : le cas de Chypre et de l’Italie. Mots :125 ► pp. 15 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.