What if hate speech really was speech?: Towards explaining hate speech in a cross-modal approach

This article contrastively analyzes the perception of written and spoken hate speech. The basic question is: How do linguistic features of hate-speech expressions affect the assessment of respondents with regards to people’s personal unacceptability of these expressions and their possible consequences for the author or speaker? Three specific aspects are addressed by means of an online survey. Firstly, we investigate the effect of the communication medium with written and spoken hate speech stimuli. Secondly, we compare different types of hate speech, defined by specific linguistic feature conditions as to their effects on reader/listener assessments. Thirdly, we examine how the two minority groups foreigners and Muslims that are addressed in the comments determine the perception of hate-speech expressions. The results suggest that less the medium in terms of written and spoken stimuli makes a difference in the assessment of hate-speech expressions than much more the addressed minority group as well as the linguistic features that are used by the author or speaker. We discuss our results with respect to their implications for identifying, classifying, and evaluating hate-speech expressions on social media platforms.