Online Hate Speech in the European Union by Stavros Assimakopoulos Fabienne H. Baider & Sharon Millar

Author:Stavros Assimakopoulos, Fabienne H. Baider & Sharon Millar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

3.6 Changing Participant Roles in the Expression of Hate Speech

Sharon Millar, Klaus Geyer, Anna Vibeke Lindø and Rasmus Nielsen

Following Goffman (1981) and Levinson (1988), it has been generally acknowledged that there are various production and reception roles in interaction that go beyond the traditional, unnuanced categories of speaker and hearer. In Goffman’s terms, these roles align or position the individual in relation to an utterance, which he terms footing. Production roles may, for instance, be in the form of animator (the person who produces the talk or the text), author (the person who creates what is said or written), relayer (the person who relays the utterances of others) or principal (the person whose position or beliefs are established by the utterance), while reception roles include those of the addressee, bystander and eavesdropper. In this setting, the role of figure refers to the entity being talked or written about. These various interactional roles have been shown to be relevant to dialogically-oriented discursive strategies, such as constructed dialogue (Tannen 2007) and fictive interaction (Pascual and Sandler 2016), which have affinities with the Bakhtinian notions of polyphony and heteroglossia. Constructed dialogue is Tannen’s preferred term for reported speech since such speech is always recontextualised into new discursive contexts, while fictive interaction concerns “the use of the conversation frame to structure cognition, discourse, and grammar” (Pascual and Sandler 2016: 3) and covers phenomena such as talking to oneself, engaging in dialogues with virtual participants, or using rhetorical questions.

One could also argue that the technological affordances of online platforms impact on participant roles. For instance, hyperlinks allow the writer of the comment to relay content, or voices, from other sources, but, since such relayed content is also recontextualised into a new discussion, the resultant participant roles of the various voices can be quite complex. Against this background, we consider here changes in participant roles in relation to both fictive interaction, constructed dialogue and hyperlinks when it comes to the expression of hate in online reactions to news items in Denmark.

We begin with an example of fictive interaction that involves the manipulation of person deixis. The relevant comment (example 33) is in response to an article in the Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet reporting how a man, who was selling his car online, was fined for writing ‘Fuck you, you Muslim’ to a bidder with an obviously foreign name, who offered what was viewed as an insultingly low price:

(33) Så dig, som vi her kan kalde Hr F. Muslim, tag dig sammen og prøv at forstå, at selvom vi er yderst tolerante, er vi ikke dumme, dette giver dig ikke ret til at skambyde på en bil eller andet du måtte ønske af os tolerante danskere. Hold op med at lukrere på, at du er muslim, hvilken betydning har det egentligt for os… Betal manden de 5000 kr. tilbage som han har fået i bøde, blot fordi du pipper om din muslimske herkomst og opfører dig som en mand og ikke en kylling. 40

So you, who we here can call Mr.

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