The Harm in Hate Speech. By Jeremy Waldron. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. 292 pp. $26.95 cloth.This well-crafted volume by Jeremy Waldron, who teaches law and philosophy at New York University and Oxford, addresses-in the words of the title-the harm in hate speech.Waldron dispatches the old saw that we must be especially vigilant to protect the speech we hate (Chapters 1 and 2), instead showing that heaping calumny on a vulnerable minority group damages a public good, namely the reasonable belief that one can go for a walk with one's children and not expect to confront an expression of hate such as a sign telling people of your background that they are unwelcome in this country. He notes that many advanced societies prohibit such expressions (pp. 8, 29) but doubts that the United States will anytime soon, even though our checkered racial history would seem to make prohibition in order here as well.The interest he is most concerned with protecting is not offense to feelings, such as that stemming from an epithet hurled from a passing car, but the deeper form of alienation that accompanies coming upon a written or tangible expression of contempt, such as graffiti, billboards, or monuments, that endure, communicating their message to all who pass that way (Chapter 5). Defending this form of racial vituperation is not at all valiant or noble, Waldron points out, explaining why it is neither necessary for a vigorous give-and-take of ideas (Chapter 2), a bigot's self-expression (Chapter 6), or the legitimacy of our system of liberal politics (Chapter 7).The book is exceptional in a number of respects. Most writers address the harm of hate speech in terms of the injury that results from trying to regulate it. Focusing almost exclusively on the affront to the hate-speaker forced to hold things in or to society at large when it loses an opportunity to ponder supposedly hard truths about black intelligence, Latino personal habits, or Muslim patriotism, these writers imagine themselves courageous defenders of an embattled position. In resisting what they think of as thought reform and political correctness, they believe that in championing "the thought we hate" they are safeguarding an unpopular but noble cause. Waldron rejects this self-serving characterization, pointing out that a more important issue in the hate-speech debate is the feelings of the black or Muslim father, out for a walk with his family and suddenly confronted with a sign telling people like him and his kids to go back whence they came.Turning to an affirmative argument, Waldron asks what a wellordered society would look like, and with the aid of simple prose and heart-rending examples concludes that it is one that provides each citizen with the assurance-a form of dignity-that they may lead their lives free from the fear of unwanted assaults on their security and wellbeing like those mentioned above (Chapter 4). …

The Harm in Hate Speech

We provide a new text corpus from the social medium Telegram, which is rich in indirect forms of divisive speech. We scraped all messages from one channel of Donald Trump supporters, covering a large part of his presidency, from late 2016 until January 2021, including the January 6 Capitol riot. The discussion among the group members, over this long time period, includes the spread of disinformation, disparaging of out-group members, and other forms of harmful speech. To enable research into the role of harmful speech in political discourse, we added two types of annotations to the corpus: (i) automatic annotations of offensive language for all messages, and (ii) our own manual annotations of harmful language for a portion of the posts leading up to the January 2021 Capitol riot and its aftermath.

/pdf/a-telegram-corpus-for-hate-speech-offensive-language-and-1f5rbsz6a7.pdf

A Telegram Corpus for Hate Speech, Offensive Language, and Online Harm

Harmful language is frequent in social media, in particular in spaces which are considered anonymous and/or allow free participation. In this paper, we analyze the language in a Telegram channel populated by followers of former US President Donald Trump. We seek to identify the ways in which harmful language is used to create a specific narrative in a group of mostly like-minded discussants. Our research has several aims. First, we create an extended taxonomy of potentially harmful language that includes not only hate speech and direct insults (which have been the focus of existing computational methods), but also other forms of harmful speech discussed in the literature. We manually apply this taxonomy to a large portion of the corpus, including the time period leading up to and the aftermath of the January 2021 US Capitol riot. Our data gives empirical evidence for harmful speech, such as in/out-group divisive language and the use of codes within certain communities, that have not often been investigated before. Second, we compare our manual annotations of harmful speech to several automatic methods for classifying hate speech and offensive language, namely list-based and machine-learning-based approaches. We find that the Telegram data sets still pose particular challenges for these automatic methods. Finally, we argue for the value of studying such naturally-occurring, coherent data sets for research on online harm and how to address it in linguistics and philosophy.

/pdf/the-telegram-chronicles-of-online-harm-4vkex7azfd.pdf

The Telegram Chronicles of Online Harm

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of face emoji (disc-shaped pictograms with stylized facial expressions) that accompany written text. We propose that there is a use of face emoji in which they comment on a target proposition expressed by the accompanying text, as opposed to making an independent contribution to discourse. Focusing on positively valenced and negatively valenced emoji (which we gloss as happy and unhappy , respectively), we argue that the emoji comment on how the target proposition bears on a contextually provided discourse value endorsed by the author. Discourse values embody what an author desires, aspires to, wishes for, or hopes for. Our analysis derives a range of non-trivial generalizations, including (i) ordering restrictions with regards to the placement of emoji and text, (ii) cases of apparent mixed emotions, and (iii) cases where the lexical content of the accompanying text influences the acceptability of a face emoji. 

/pdf/a-semantics-of-face-emoji-in-discourse-3issi0e3.pdf

A semantics of face emoji in discourse

Language is typically embedded in multimodal communication, yet models of linguistic competence do not often incorporate this complexity. Meanwhile, speech, gesture, and/or pictures are each considered as indivisible components of multimodal messages. Here, we argue that multimodality should not be characterized by whole interacting behaviors, but by interactions of similar substructures which permeate across expressive behaviors. These structures comprise a unified architecture and align within Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture: a modality, meaning, and grammar. Because this tripartite architecture persists across modalities, interactions can manifest within each of these substructures. Interactions between modalities alone create correspondences in time (ex. speech with gesture) or space (ex. writing with pictures) of the sensory signals, while multimodal meaning-making balances how modalities carry “semantic weight” for the gist of the whole expression. Here we focus primarily on interactions between grammars, which contrast across two variables: symmetry, related to the complexity of the grammars, and allocation, related to the relative independence of interacting grammars. While independent allocations keep grammars separate, substitutive allocation inserts expressions from one grammar into those of another. We show that substitution operates in interactions between all three natural modalities (vocal, bodily, graphic), and also in unimodal contexts within and between languages, as in codeswitching. Altogether, we argue that unimodal and multimodal expressions arise as emergent interactive states from a unified cognitive architecture, heralding a reconsideration of the “language faculty” itself.

/pdf/remarks-on-multimodality-grammatical-interactions-in-the-1kjdo5px.pdf

Remarks on Multimodality: Grammatical Interactions in the Parallel Architecture

The processing of emoji-word substitutions: A self-paced-reading study

Abstract Clefts are well-studied as a construction which induces emphasis on its clefted referent. However, little is known about the distribution of different stylistic forms of it-cleft variants. We report on a corpus study mining data from Twitter, targeting sentences clefting a pronoun in English. We examine the following features: case and syntactic role of the clefted pronoun, contraction of the copula, choice of complementiser and use of emphasis markers. The results show systematic associations between these features. A further comparison between the Twitter dataset and data from iWeb, a corpus of general-use web language, shows significant differences in levels of emphasis and formality, positioning Twitter language in the middle of the conceptual orality spectrum.

/pdf/form-variation-of-pronominal-it-clefts-in-written-english-a-22xb67wl7u.pdf

Form variation of pronominal it-clefts in written English: A corpus study in Twitter and iWeb


 Linguistic expressions in social media vary along many axes, including author style, the specific medium and its
 affordances, and others. In this paper, we argue that different registers must be distinguished within social media and that
 register should be included as an important factor independent of (social) medium in analyses of variable linguistic phenomena. We
 introduce a new German cross-media corpus, consisting of blog posts and tweets from the same 44 authors. We define the registers
 as ‘Informative’, ‘Narrative’, and ‘Persuasive’, based on situational characteristics of the texts. We then correlate the
 registers with two variable linguistic phenomena: German modal and intensifying particles. In each case, we document considerable
 inter- and intraindividual variation in the expressions used and their frequency across texts. The statistical analysis shows that
 the register grouping corresponds more closely to linguistic similarities between texts than the grouping by medium does.

/pdf/the-medium-is-not-the-message-qsnwfqsj.pdf

Tatjana Scheffler

Papers

The processing of emoji-word substitutions: A self-paced-reading study

A Telegram Corpus for Hate Speech, Offensive Language, and Online Harm

The Telegram Chronicles of Online Harm

Form variation of pronominal it-clefts in written English: A corpus study in Twitter and iWeb

The medium is not the message