Xenophobia Online: Focusing on the Analysis of Comments on Racial and Xenophobic Articles in Germany

Abstract

This paper deals with the hate expressions that appear in the comments of articles dealing with racism, migrants or xenophobia among news articles posted on Facebook by German media from a pragmatic point of view. In particular, the hate speech acts of the comments are brought out by relying on Searle's speech act theory. Hate groups can be divided into all foreigners, certain races (black and Asian) and Muslims. The representative hate speech acts are ‘deny’ for foreigners as a whole, ‘reject’, ‘rebuke’ and ‘insult’ for black people, and ‘insult’ for Asians. The representative speech acts of hate towards Muslims are ‘to disparage’, ‘to incite’ and ‘to insult’ etc. The hatred of foreigners as a whole stems from the rejection of outside groups. The hatred of black people is based on biological racism. The hatred of Asians appears in relation to the incident or in prejudice against a particular ethnic group. The hatred of Muslims is based on cultural racism.