Digital ethics challengers in Russian and English media texts: Migrant discourse case study

Abstract

With digital technologies penetrating all spheres of life, the problem of digital ethics has become one of the most perspective and widely researched tasks of modern science and linguistics in particular. Digitalization influences the processes of media communication, which requires development of certain ethical standards in virtual environment. The given study aims at analysing and comparing digital ethics in Russian and English media texts. Within the framework of this study, digital etiquette is seen as a continuation of speech etiquette aimed at neutralizing aggression towards vulnerable members of society in the online environment. Using a combination of methods, namely sentiment analysis and analysis of lexical associations, messages about migrants in social networks, forums, blogs, instant messengers and microblogs were analyzed. The sentiment orientation of the text was determined using an automatic text analysis program and subsequent linguistic expertise. For this study we collected social media data of 8,478,629 characters (VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, YouTube, etc.). For the analysis of English-language media texts, iWeb data on the input word migrant was collected. The total volume of the analyzed English-language Internet messages is 1,185,200 characters. Migrant discourse in Russian and English social media texts is polythematic. The results show that negative and neutral tone prevail in English media texts while in Russian there are neutral, positive and negative texts. In English media texts, there are messages expressing solidarity with migrants. At the same time, the problems of ethnic intolerance and religious stereotyping still require consideration and further development of regulatory tools.