Understanding Inciting Speech as New Malice

Abstract

Inciting speech seeks to instill hostility or anger in readers or motivate them to take action against a target group. Whereas hate speech in social media has garnered much attention, inciting speech has not been well studied in domains such as religion. We address two aspects of religious incitement: 1) what rhetorical strategies are used in it?; and 2) do the same strategies apply across disparate social contexts and targets? We identify inciting speech against Muslims but demonstrate the generality of the construct vis à vis other targets. We adopt existing datasets of Islamophobic WhatsApp posts and hateful and offensive posts (Twitter and Gab) against other targets. Our methods include: 1) qualitative analysis revealing rhetorical strategies; and 2) an iterative process to label the data, yielding a tool to detect incitement. Incitement applies three rhetorical strategies focused, respectively, on the target group's identity, their imputed misdeeds, and an exhortation to act against them. These strategies carry distinct textual signatures. Our tool (with additional verification) reveals that inciting sentences appear in non-Islamophobic posts and in other contexts (e.g., posts against certain gender identities), indicating the generality of incitement as a concept. Incitement reflects a wide swath of malicious speech omitted from traditional analyses. Understanding and identifying incitement can facilitate online moderation and thus concomitantly reduce harm in real life.