Abstract
Today, aggressive verbal behavior is generally perceived as a threat to integrity and democratic quality of public discussions, including those online. However, we argue that, in more restrictive political regimes, communicative aggression may play constructive roles in both discussion dynamics and empowerment of political groups. This might be especially true for restrictive political and legal environments like Russia, where obscene speech is prohibited by law in registered media and the political environment does not give much space for voicing discontent. Taking Russian YouTube as an example, we explore the roles of two under-researched types of communicative aggression—obscene speech and politically motivated hate speech—within the publics of video commenters. For that, we use the case of the Moscow protests of 2019 against non-admission of independent and oppositional candidates to run for the Moscow city parliament. The sample of over 77,000 comments for 13 videos of more than 100,000 views has undergone pre-processing and vocabulary-based detection of aggression. To assess the impact of hate speech upon the dynamics of the discussions, we have used Granger tests and assessment of discussion histograms; we have also assessed the selected groups of posts in an exploratory manner. Our findings demonstrate that communicative aggression helps to express immediate support and solidarity. It also contextualizes the criticism towards both the authorities and regime challengers, as well as demarcates the counter-public.
Highlights
In contemporary networked discussions, aggressive verbal behavior is a widespread phenomenon
We have formulated four types of communicative aggression, all politically relevant and tabooed/prohibited by law: 1) Humiliation, including politically motivated hate speech and discriminative expressions—this type is partly directed at authorities and police and, might fall under the law on offence of civil servants; 2) radical political claims, including calls for aggressive action against individuals or groups—this is prohibited, as it may be considered extremism or a call to overthrow the existing political system; and 3) obscene language, which is tabooed and prohibited by the law against public swearing
The videos that happened to be in our collection belonged to three types: foreign media in Russian (BBC News, Euronews, DW, and a Ukrainian correspondent in Moscow), Russian oppositional public political figures active in media/online (Alexey Navalny, Maxim Shevchenko), and activist channels focused mainly on independent news production (My Protest, Mordor Channel, and Superpower News)
Summary
Aggressive verbal behavior is a widespread phenomenon. Media and Communication, 2021, Volume 9, Issue 1, Pages 181–194 discussions (Vollhardt, Coutin, Staub, Weiss, & Deflander, 2007) and their normatively understood democratic quality (Cortese, 2006) In this capacity, it is simultaneously a digital threat of a non-political nature (Salter, Kuehn, Berentson-Shaw, & Elliott, 2019) and a threat to a rational and politically relevant public sphere (Miller & Vaccari, 2020; Pfetsch, 2018). This line of debate does not, in effect, challenge the understanding of aggressive speech as a threat, and only a threat, to democratic discussion; here, only the boundaries of what may be banned are debated It does not address the issue of politically motivated offensive language, as, in democracies, political groups are not considered disadvantaged minorities
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