Hate Lingo: A Target-based Linguistic Analysis of Hate Speech in Social Media

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the linguistic differences between targeted and generalized hate speech on social media, revealing distinct markers that can improve understanding and detection of hate speech.

Contribution

It provides the first linguistic and psycholinguistic analysis distinguishing directed and generalized hate speech, highlighting their unique markers and social implications.

Findings

Directed hate speech is more personal, informal, and aggressive.

Generalized hate speech often involves religious hate and lethal words.

Distinct linguistic markers can aid in hate speech detection.

Abstract

While social media empowers freedom of expression and individual voices, it also enables anti-social behavior, online harassment, cyberbullying, and hate speech. In this paper, we deepen our understanding of online hate speech by focusing on a largely neglected but crucial aspect of hate speech -- its target: either "directed" towards a specific person or entity, or "generalized" towards a group of people sharing a common protected characteristic. We perform the first linguistic and psycholinguistic analysis of these two forms of hate speech and reveal the presence of interesting markers that distinguish these types of hate speech. Our analysis reveals that Directed hate speech, in addition to being more personal and directed, is more informal, angrier, and often explicitly attacks the target (via name calling) with fewer analytic words and more words suggesting authority and influence. Generalized hate speech, on the other hand, is dominated by religious hate, is characterized by the use of lethal words such as murder, exterminate, and kill; and quantity words such as million and many. Altogether, our work provides a data-driven analysis of the nuances of online-hate speech that enables not only a deepened understanding of hate speech and its social implications but also its detection.