Determination of the Internet Anonymity Influence on the Level of Aggression and Usage of Obscene Lexis
This research addresses the impact of online anonymity on aggressive behavior for internet communities and moderation practices, but it is incremental as it builds on existing linguistic and social media studies.
The study analyzed anonymous forums like 2ch.hk to assess how anonymity affects aggression and obscene language usage, finding that anonymity does not increase invective use and that Russian obscene lexis only expresses aggression in 60.4% of cases.
This article deals with the analysis of the semantic content of the anonymous Russian-speaking forum 2ch.hk, different verbal means of expressing of the emotional state of aggression are revealed for this site, and aggression is classified by its directions. The lexis of different Russian-and English- speaking anonymous forums (2ch.hk and iichan.hk, 4chan.org) and public community "MDK" of the Russian-speaking social network VK is analyzed and compared with the Open Corpus of the Russian language (Opencorpora.org and Brown corpus). The analysis shows that anonymity has no influence on the amount of invective items usage. The effectiveness of moderation was shown for anonymous forums. It was established that Russian obscene lexis was used to express the emotional state of aggression only in 60.4% of cases for 2ch.hk. These preliminary results show that the Russian obscene lexis on the Internet does not have direct dependence on the emotional state of aggression.