Hateful and Other Negative Communication in Online Commenting Environments: Content, Structure and Targets

Information and communication technologies are increasingly interacting with modern societies. One specific manifestation of this interaction concerns hateful and other negative comments in online environments. Various terms appear to denote this communication, from flaming, indecency and intolerance to hate speech. However, there is still a lack of an umbrella term that broadly captures this communication. Therefore, this paper introduces the concept of socially unacceptable discourse, which serves as the basis for an empirical study that evaluated online comments scraped from the Facebook pages of the three most-visited Slovenian news outlets. Machine-learning algorithms were used to narrow the focus to topics related to refugees and LGBT rights. Ten thousand comments were manually coded to identify and structure socially undesirable discourse. The results show that about half of all comments belonged to this type of discourse, with a surprisingly stable level and structure across media (i.e., right-wing versus mainstream) and topics. Most of these comments could also be considered a potential violation of hate speech legislation. In the context of these findings, the political and ideological consequences and implications of mediatised emotions are discussed.