Hate Speech Forms and Implications in English and Kurdish Social Media

Abstract

Social media platforms have become a favorable way of communication, sharing opinion and views about different topics around the world freely. Freedom of expression or free speech is the right to say whatever one likes; it has been sometimes conflated with hate speech. The latter is a public communication that expresses hate or advocates violence toward a person or group based on their race, religion or sex. The aim of the current study is to see the reactions of Kurdish and English commentators on similar political posts on Facebook platform, and what forms of hate speech were used more in each of them based on Bahador’s (2020) Intense Scale of Hate Speech model. After analyzing three similar posts, it has been concluded that the majority of the English commentators used negative character, while the majority of the Kurdish commentators used Dehumanization and Demonization, in which it was only found in one comment on the English posts.