Constructive Aggression? Multiple Roles of Aggressive Content in Political Discourse on Russian YouTube (original) (raw)

A Self-Critical Public: Cumulation of Opinion on Belarusian Oppositional YouTube before the 2020 Protests

Social Media + Society

YouTube-based discussions are a growing area of academic attention. However, we still lack knowledge on whether YouTube provides for forming critical publics in countries with no established democratic tradition. To address this question, we study commenting to Belarusian oppositional YouTube blogs in advance of the major wave of Belarusian post-election protests of 2020. Based on the crawled data of the whole year of 2018 for six Belarusian political videoblogs, we define the structure of the commenters’ community, detect the core commenters, and assess their discourse for aggression, orientation of dialogue, direction of criticism, and antagonism/agonism. We show that, on Belarusian YouTube, the commenters represented a genuine adversarial self-critical public with cumulative patterns of solidarity formation and find markers of readiness for the protest spillover.

Agrressive language and insults in digital political participation

The paper presents a socio-cognitive model of discredit in political communication by focusing on aggressive language in the web to analyze different types of speech act like insults and evaluative comments. Based on this model a case study is presented on the aggressiveness of a political leader and his followers on social media, trying to disentangle the social and linguistic mechanisms implied in this kind of communicative exchange. Results, by means of a quanti-qualitative methodology, highlight the emerging of a polarization of reactions to a political leader's verbal aggression: the great majority of his followers exacerbate tones but at the same time an "active" minority grows expressing indignation and reflecting on political morality by "divergent" comments.

Attacks on Democracy? A Troll-Attack on YouTube

Antisemitism on Social Media, 2022

A recent incident of antisemitic trolling in Germany provides the basis for the analysis of methods and goals of antisemitic trolling through a combination of qualitative discourse analysis and digital textual analysis with the help of the digital tool suite Voyant. The analysis is based on a case study that the authors of this chapter witnessed live. At the online event of the Kompetenzzentrum gegen Antisemitismus und Rechtsextremismus. Angriffe auf die Demokratie [Competence Center Against Antisemitism and Right-Wing Extremism. Attacks on Democracy] on September 16–17, 2020, trolls aggressively disrupted the associated YouTube live chat with antisemitic messages. The analysis of the chat messages from this event carried out here examines the extent to which the trolls used various antisemitic topoi to shift the discourse in the YouTube Live Chat to ultimately delegitimize the event.

Ukrainian Political Internet Discourse: Signs of Language Aggression

Studies in Media and Communication

The problem of language aggression, hostility, and contempt is one of the most acute in the modern world. The rapid spread of this phenomenon is associated with the development of the Internet and social networks, which led to revolutionary changes in people's communication and the emergence of new types of socio-political interaction. The accessibility of internet resources, the absence of communication barriers that are present in real life, and the speed of information transmission have greatly expanded social contacts. The growth of language aggression, hostility, and contempt in society and the resulting need to invent and implement models of nonviolent language interaction have created new areas for research for Ukrainian linguists. The purpose of the study is to define such concepts as language aggression, hostility, and contempt; to identify the dominant areas of language aggression, hostility, and contempt in the Ukrainian political internet discourse. Language aggressi...

The Mainstreaming of Verbally Aggressive Online Political Behaviors

Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 2015

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the relationship between verbal aggression and uncivil media attention on political flaming. More specifically, this paper examines whether the use of uncivil media programming is associated with the perceived acceptability and intention to engage in aggressive online discussions (i.e., online political flaming) and whether this relationship varies by verbal aggression. The results show that individuals less inclined to engage in aggressive communication tactics (i.e., low in verbal aggression) become more accepting of flaming and show greater intention to flame as their attention to uncivil media increases. By contrast, those with comparatively higher levels of verbal aggression show a decrease in acceptance and intention to flame as their attention to these same media increases.

Trolling as Provocation: YouTube's Agonistic Publics (Convergence, 2014)

Convergence

This article explores the productive role of provocation in YouTube publics in the context of two culturally and geographically situated visual events that took place in New Zealand throughout 2011. Through qualitative analysis of the extensive comments fields for the two videos, the article examines the nature of participatory acts associated with what has been called at different times flaming, hating or trolling. The article argues that such acts can only be properly understood within their cultural and geographic context and in their ability to affect and extend ‘agonistic’ publics. The analysis addresses online passion, conflict and vitriol through the notion of ‘acts of citizenship’, as productive forms of provocation.

Online hate propaganda during election period: The case of Macedonia

Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 2018

The paper offers a critical discursive and pragmatic analysis of a corpus of hateful Facebook and Twitters status updates of politicians, political activists and voters in the 2016 pre-and-post election period, in Macedonia. Aiming to determine how power is exerted on social media, the paper focuses on identifying the stance social media users take when posting messages with political content. The analysis first attempted to unveil what speech acts the hateful posts are predominantly composed of (e.g. assertive, directives, expressives), what roles the authors of the posts normally assume, who the hateful political discourse in the given socio-political context is directed to, as well as what are some of the predominant linguistic strategies underlying the analysed hateful comments. The results show that, by using mostly assertive and expressive speech acts, social media users assume mainly the roles of analysts and judges and only subsequently the one of activists, they mostly addr...

Communicative Aggression in the Russian Media Sphere: Background and Manifestations

Indian Journal of Science and Technology, 2016

Background/Objectives: The relevance of the study is due to the increase in frequency of manifestations of socially dangerous aggression in the public media discourse. Analysis of the genesis and dynamics of communication aggression is an important task for humanities and social practice. In this regard, the article aims to reveal both manifestations of communicative aggression in the Russian media sphere, and the creation of the methodology for the analysis of a new social phenomenon. Method: The essence of the problem determined the actual reliance on the methodology of value analysis of the media, allowing considering the genesis and the dynamics of communicative aggression in full. The object of the study is the Russian media sphere during public discussions (2014–15) on the issue of the Crimea reunification with Russia. Content analysis (target sample out of 11 publications) has been used on a quantitative level. A trigger-analysis has been applied on the qualitative level. Findings: In the article the following provisions have been justified: media discourse in Russia is the unity and confrontation between the sacred and the secular discourses; the sacred discourse establishes “value absolutes”, and a secular discourse is expressed in interpretations and discussions, tends to the liberal values; media discourse is influenced by stigmatization – an exclusion of certain values in the political and cultural spheres; mass media – spontaneously and purposefully – spread and reinforce phobia among the audience in the political and cultural spheres. Improvements: Article findings are of practical value to policy functionaries and political strategists, theorists of journalism and media managers.

Blogging nation: Russian race riots online

New media sources provide a rich pool of data for political scientists. This is especially true within the field of securitisation theory, where tracing the audience's reaction to discourses is paramount. The blogosphere's quintessentially interactive environment serves as a fertile ground for observing reactions of 'netizens' within their 'habitat' without the caveats of the artificiality of lab experiments or the inherent bias of questionnaires. This paper focuses on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of blog commentaries to entries in the Russian-speaking segment of LiveJournal.com, which pertain to the Manezhnaia riots of December 2010. I argue that an analysis of the blogosphere can complete the methodological gaps within the field of securitisation theory.