Impoliteness in reader comments on the Al-Jazeera channel news website

Abstract Many internet users actively participate and share their views using social networks. Their behavior is sometimes unpredictable; it could be polite or impolite. This study aims to investigate impoliteness in the comment section of the Al-Jazeera Arabic news website to uncover the types of impolite acts which commenters engage in online, and expose conventionalized and non-conventionalized impoliteness triggers. It also seeks to explore the influence of computer-mediated contextual factors, such as anonymity and synchronicity on impoliteness. The study adopts Neurauter-Kessels’ framework (2011) to identify the types of face attacks and Culpeper’s bottom-up model (2011, 2016) of impoliteness triggers to classify impolite acts. The analysis shows that commenters engage in FTAs that are targeting the writers. The most frequent attack is the lack of balance, wholeness, fairness, and objectivity and the least frequent is being out of touch or having a lack of interaction with the audience. Commenters also employ both conventionalized and non-conventionalized impoliteness formulas in their face-attacks. Findings indicate that there are some distinctive features of Arabic impoliteness discourse, such as the use of colloquialisms, proverbs and idioms, religious expressions and interjections. The analysis also reveals that anonymity and asynchronicity are significant in accounting for the manifestation of impoliteness.