The sociocognitive dimension of hate speech in readers’ comments on Serbian news websites

Abstract

Comment sections on news websites bear no immediate threat of sanctions and users feel free to express open criticism or insult. Other than causing offense and undermining the dignity of readers with a different opinion, a rather dangerous outcome of hate speech is that it affects the sociocognitive interface between discourse and society in the sense that it has a negative impact on the readers’ cognitive notions of information, beliefs and knowledge. Based on the analytical approach proposed in Sociocognitive Discourse Studies, the study examines 939 comments posted in the comment section of the Serbian news website Politika. Besides confirming that hate speech in the readers’ comments is a rather frequent means of establishing a communicative Common Ground among news readers, the analysis shows that hate speech is a reflection of the negative impact of news on the sociocognitive interface between discourse and society. The research also demonstrates that Sociocognitive Discourse Studies may be applied to the analysis of readers’ comments as a specific type of written discourse that reflects the mental models news readers create when exposed to media discourse.

Introduction

The role of comment sections on news websites has recently become a recurring focus of scholarly research in the field of media discourse analysis (Barnes, 2018, Bruce, 2018, KhosraviNik and Zia, 2014, Tenenboim and Cohen, 2015, Toepfl and Piwoni, 2015, Weizman and Dori-Hacohen, 2017, Yeo et al., 2019). Initially introduced to encourage public discussion and monitor reader engagement, comment sections often become a platform of derogatory and pejorative language rather than serving the purpose of civil debate. Such discourse necessitates closer research.

Readers’ comments reflect a reaction to news content, thus creating a specific interface between a news article and its readership (Weizman & Dori-Hacohen, 2017). This interface is dominated by a dimension that relates discourse structures to social structures and shows the immediate effect of this relationship (Bruce, 2018, Toepfl and Piwoni, 2015). Thus readers’ comments demonstrate how the information presented to them in the news affects their attitudes, ideologies and language use. Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) relates the structural properties of text or talk to social structures, enables both the analysis of the discourse structure of a comment and its context and provides the grounds for an explicit viewpoint (van Dijk, 2018). However, it lacks the sociocognitive dimension to relate the discourse structure to social structures via a sociocognitive interface which is needed to critically describe the cognitive aspects of concepts used by readers (2018).

Assuming that particular news provoke a specific response, an important aspect to consider is that of newsworthiness, i.e. news values which are criteria applied by news workers when creating news (Bednarek & Caple, 2014). Any set of news values constructed by journalists is expected to attract readers’ attention, instigate meaning and motivate action, such as posting a comment referring to a specific news item. Given that readers’ comments are a reflection of the interaction between discourse structures and social structures via a sociocognitive dimension, this study refers to the theory of Sociocognitive Discourse Studies (SCDS) proposed by van Dijk, 2016, van Dijk, 2018. The sociocognitive approach establishes the discourse-cognition-society triangle and it provides the relevant tools to explore the cognitively mediated relations between discourse and society (van Dijk, 2016) that comments reflect. Since discourse structures and social structures are different, a relationship between them can be established only through the mental representations of language users who are both individuals and social members. Their ideas, knowledge and opinions are an interpretation of the mutual relationship between social structures and discourse structures. Social structures influence discourse structures through people’s interpretations of the social environment they are part of and vice versa, discourse structures can only influence social structures through the same cognitive interface of mental models, knowledge attitudes and ideologies (2016).

The present research is based on a corpus of comments posted by readers on the website of the Serbian news outlet Politika. The aim is to analyse the comments from the point of view of SCDS so as to examine how hate speech (HS) in them is affecting the sociocognitive interface between discourse and society. An additional analysis of the linguistic devices and news values (Bednarek & Caple, 2014) used in the articles that generated the comments will show what news values provoked the readers to post comments. The hypothesis is that HS in readers’ comments on news websites indicates a negative impact of news on the readers’ cognitive notions of information, beliefs and knowledge. Based on a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of the compiled corpus, two objectives will be pursued: (1) examine whether HS in the readers’ comments is a means of establishing a communicative Common Ground among news readers and (2) find evidence that HS in readers’ comments is a reflection of the negative impact of news on the sociocognitive interface between discourse and society.