Dialogues of Dissent: Thematic and Rhetorical Dimensions of Hate and Counter-Hate Speech in Social Media Conversations
This work addresses the problem of understanding and mitigating hate speech online for researchers and social media platforms, but it is incremental as it builds on existing annotation methods with new dimensions.
The authors tackled the problem of analyzing hate and counter-hate speech in social media by introducing a multi-labeled annotation scheme with thematic and rhetorical dimensions, and they annotated 92 conversations (720 tweets) to explore interaction patterns, providing insights into message spread and counter-strategies.
We introduce a novel multi-labeled scheme for joint annotation of hate and counter-hate speech in social media conversations, categorizing hate and counter-hate messages into thematic and rhetorical dimensions. The thematic categories outline different discursive aspects of each type of speech, while the rhetorical dimension captures how hate and counter messages are communicated, drawing on Aristotle's Logos, Ethos and Pathos. We annotate a sample of 92 conversations, consisting of 720 tweets, and conduct statistical analyses, incorporating public metrics, to explore patterns of interaction between the thematic and rhetorical dimensions within and between hate and counter-hate speech. Our findings provide insights into the spread of hate messages on social media, the strategies used to counter them, and their potential impact on online behavior.