‘Why aren’t you married? The same reason you are not dead, it’s not my time’: Social Media Use of Hate Speech on Female Celebrities in Ghana

Abstract

This study is aimed at analysing the rhetoric of hate speech and the degree of pervasiveness in discriminating against the female celebrity?s identity on social media which is often centred on the question: „why aren?t you married or why haven?t you still given birth?? The paper sought to examine the nature of social media posts of five female celebrities who had experienced the phenomenon of flaming through hate speech and explore the adoptive strategies of these female celebrities to ward off perpetrators of flames. Data was cyber-ethnographically gathered from the Twitter and Facebook pages of the female celebrities and thematically analysed using Willard?s Indicators of Cyberbullying and the tenets of Suler?s Online Disinhibition Effect. The findings revealed that the female celebrities experienced direct flames manifested in comments of aggression including dissing, hurtful jocular messages, invectives, snide comments, obsessive and malicious stalking, and profanity. A flamer of an attack attains a pseudo- celebrification status as other celebrity friends or fans of the female celebrity join in a particular hate speech episode as bystander reporters to either provide support to the victim or reinforce the attack. The data also revealed that the female celebrities mainly used instant blocking and the adoption of an aggressive persona as a strategy to rebut their abusers through clap backs, invectives, and evocation of death or curses as a way of warding off online abusers. The study thus contributes to the literature on gender stereotyping through flaming and recommends female celebrities employ the services of social media managers as gatekeepers for their accounts. Also, efforts at stringent laws of civility should be intensified in protecting the image of social media users in an era of social media pervasiveness.