The Telegram Chronicles of Online Harm

Abstract

Harmful and dangerous language is frequent in social media, in particular in spaces which are considered anonymous and/or allow free participation. In this paper, we analyse the language in a Telegram channel populated by followers of Donald Trump, in order to identify the ways in which harmful language is used to create a specific narrative in a group of mostly like-minded discussants. Our research has several aims. First, we create an extended taxonomy of potentially harmful language that includes not only hate speech and direct insults, but also more indirect ways of poisoning online discourse, such as divisive speech and the glorification of violence. We apply this taxonomy to a large portion of the corpus. Our data gives empirical evidence for harmful speech such as in/out-group divisive language and the use of codes within certain communities which have not often been investigated before. Second, we compare our manual annotations to several automatic methods of classifying hate speech and offensive language, namely list based and machine learning based approaches. We find that the Telegram data set still poses particular challenges for these automatic methods. Finally, we argue for the value of studying such naturally occurring, coherent data sets for research on online harm and how to address it in linguistics and philosophy.

Links

PhilArchive

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

  • Only published works are available at libraries.

Similar books and articles

What Is the Harm of Hate Speech?Eric Barendt - 2019 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (3):539-553.
Dignity, Harm, and Hate Speech.Robert Mark Simpson - 2013 - Law and Philosophy 32 (6):701-728.
Free vs hate speech on social media: the Indian perspective.Iftikhar Alam, Roshan Lal Raina & Faizia Siddiqui - 2016 - Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society 14 (4):350-363.
Speech and Harm: Controversies Over Free Speech.Ishani Maitra & Mary Kate McGowan (eds.) - 2012 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Analytics

Added to PP
2021-04-08

Downloads
272 (#68,015)

6 months
70 (#55,308)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Mihaela Popa-Wyatt
University of Manchester

Citations of this work

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references