Vocabulary of Hatred in Social Media

Abstract

The study focuses on Facebook, one of the most popular socialnetworking sites in our time, given its position in the digital world andthe importance of the verbal component in it. The main objective of theresearch is to investigate whether in a corpus of utterances in Italiancoming from two public Facebook groups, the incitement to hatred man-ifests itself through the use of slurs, the choice of which is delimited byprecise criteria. The presence of the selected words is verified throughautomatic searches with the tools available on Facebook. Moreover, theanalysis 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.