Hate lingo: A target-based linguistic analysis of hate speech in social media

Abstract

While social media empowers freedom of expression and individual voices, it also enables anti-social behavior, online harassment, cyberbullying, and hate speech. In this paper, we deepen our understanding of online hate speech by focusing on a largely neglected but crucial aspect of hate speech–its target: either directed towards a specific person or entity, or generalized towards a group of people sharing a common protected characteristic. We perform the first linguistic and psycholinguistic analysis of these two forms of hate speech