Vocabulary of Hatred in Social Media

An Example from Italian

Authors

• Anna Dyda Jagiellonian University https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5116-7586
• Alicja Paleta Jagiellonian University https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5146-6244

DOI: https://doi.org/10.51814/nm.130138

Keywords:

hate speech, Italian language, social media, Facebook, slurs

Abstract

The study focuses on Facebook, one of the most popular social
networking sites in our time, given its position in the digital world and
the importance of the verbal component in it. The main objective of the
research is to investigate whether in a corpus of utterances in Italian
coming from two public Facebook groups, the incitement to hatred man-
ifests itself through the use of slurs, the choice of which is delimited by
precise criteria. The presence of the selected words is verified through
automatic searches with the tools available on Facebook. Moreover, the
analysis is aimed at discovering whether slurs always carry their deni-
gratory potential, or whether they can also have a non-denigratory use.
Some possible extensions of the research will also be defined.