Towards Balance and Boundaries in Public Discourse: Expressing and Perceiving Online Hate Speech (XPEROHS)

This study presents an overview and preliminary findings from the XPEROHS-project on hate speech in online contexts. The data is extracted from large-scale Facebook and Twitter corpora, while comparing linguistic instantiations of hate speech in the Danish and German languages. Findings are based on four sub-projects involving the semantics and pragmatics of denigration, the covert dynamics of hate speech, perceptions of spoken and written hate speech, and rhetorical hate speech strategies employed in online interaction. The results demonstrate both overt and covert hate speech towards minority groups, especially Muslims, that are symptomatic of larger societal othering processes and stigmatization.