A Corpus Analysis of Hate Speech in Pakistani Political Discourse on Twitter
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.61506/01.00031Keywords:
Hate Speech, Language change, Collocation patterns, Frequency Patterns, TweetsAbstract
This paper is a corpus-based quantitative study on language change that has arisen during national political events, such as the no-confidence movement against Imran Khan, the Prime Minister of Pakistan. This event, including many others, has given rise to the hate speech in Pakistani community online. In this paper, language change is discussed in terms of hate speech, collocation patterns, frequency of words (Nouns, Adjectives), N-Grams and Urdu hate speech words. A certain political time period is selected to make a comparison of the use of language and explore whether any variations have transpired during the political upheavals. These dynamics are explored because the frequency of hate speech words may suggest that how much aggressive the online political discourse has become. Moreover, it may also suggest that what kind of image is presented to the rest of the world through such usage of words. To find out the case, a data of 50,000 tweets was gathered using Tweetarchivist.com. This data was analyzed through sketch engine. The major findings from the research, reported in this paper, show that many of the tweets, through their collocations and frequency, contain hate speech elements which convey a negative image of the country across the globe.
References
Aitchison, J. (1981). Language Change: Progress or Decay? New York: Cambridge University Press.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bernstein, M. S., A. Monroy-Hernández, D. Harry, P. André, K. Panovich, & Vargas, G. (2011). 4chan and /b/: An analysis of anonymity and ephemerality in a large online community. In Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Barcelona, Spain. AAAI Press.
Boyd, D. (2010). ―for the lolz‖: 4chan is hacking the attention economy.
Byrnes, J. D. (2002). Measure Human Aggression, How To. Florida: Center for Aggression Management.
Chen, M. K. (2013). The E§ect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from. American Economic Review, 690-731.
Christopherson, K. M. (2007). The positive and negative implications of anonymity in Internet social interactions: 'On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog. ‘Computers in Human Behavior, 23(6), 3038-3056.
Gillani, D. (2021). The Cambridge History of Terrorism. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press.
Haque, J. (2014). Hate Speech: A study of Pakistan's cyberspace. Hate Speech: A Study of Pakistan's Cyberspace.
Huesmann, L. R., & Taylor, L. D. (2006). The Role of Media Violence in Violent Behavior. Annu. Rev. Public Health .
Hussein, B. A.-S. (2012). The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Today. Theory and Practice in Language Studies Vol. 2, No. 3, 642-646.
Kalaba, J. (2014). The Subversive Role of Verbal Aggression in the Sarcastic Language of Njuz.net. SIC- - A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, 2-14.
Kalmoe, N. P. (2010). Does Violent Political Rhetoric Fuel Political Violence? Support for Political Violence in a National Survey Experiment. American Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting (pp. 1-32). Washington, D.C.,: Gerald R. Ford Fellowship and the Marsh Research Fellowship.
Kalmoe, Nathan. (2014). Fueling the Fire: Violent Metaphors, Trait Aggression, and Support for Political Violence. Political Communication. 31.
Khan, A. (2013). Pakistan and the Narratives of Extremism. Washington: United States Institution of Peace.
Lagerspetz, K. M., Björkqvist, K., & Peltonen, T. (1988). Is indirect aggression typical of females? Gender differences in aggressiveness in 11- to 12-year-old children. Aggressive Behavior, 14(6), 403-414.
Lally, P., Jaarsveld, C., Potts, H. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 998-1009.
Muller, K., Schwarz,C. (2018) Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime. Working Papers Series. The University of Warwick.
P., Jaarsveld, C., Potts, H. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 998-1009.
Pfeffer J, Zorbach T, Carley K M (2014). Understanding online fire storms: Negative word-of mouth dynamics in social media networks. Journal of Marketing Communications. 2014; 20(1/2):117–28.
Reason, L. (2008, June). Language as a Social Construction. Retrieved from International School: http://www.internationalschool.info/language-as-a-social-construction/
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. R. (1985). Indirect speech acts. In J. P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics: Speech acts. Academic Press: Academic Press.
Subrahmanyam, K., & Greenfield, P. (2008). Online communication and adolescent relationships. Future of Children, 18(1), 119-146.
Wahlström, M., Törnberg, A., & Ekbrand, H. (2021). Dynamics of violent and dehumanizing rhetoric in far-right social media. New Media & Society, 23(11), 3290–3311.
William R. Nugent, Thereasa E. Abrams, Andrea A. Joseph. (2022) The Relationship between Violent Political Rhetoric and Mass Shootings. Journal of Social Service Research 48:2, pages 246-258.
