In this study, we examine key psychological dimensions in the manifestos authored by the perpetrators of the Christchurch and Utøya massacres, the right-wing extremists Brenton Tarrant and Anders Breivik, and the ISIS propaganda magazine Rumiyah. All texts were authored and disseminated virtually with the purpose of attracting or consolidating support, and justifying violent, discriminatory actions. While right-wing supremacist and extremist Islamist discourses are ostensibly ideologically opposed, previous research has posited the existence of ideational and emotive commonalities. We approach this from a corpus-linguistic perspective, and employ the software LIWC2015 and Wmatrix to explore the dominant psychological dimensions, semantic categories and keywords in these texts. We identify elements that contribute to the construction of a narrative of hate, peril and urgency, and discuss differences in the imagery used to construct these meanings and to appeal to different audiences. Whilst our analysis supports the existence of commonalities in ideological content and discursive strategies, our results identify differences in the target of hate in right-wing supremacist discourse and we differentiate between primarily Islamophobic and racist motives. Finally, we also discuss the limitations inherent in employing these software tools to analyse discourse in the Web 2.0 era.
Many internet users actively participate and share their views using social networks. Their behavior is sometimes unpredictable; it could be polite or impolite. This study aims to investigate impoliteness in the comment section of the Al-Jazeera Arabic news website to uncover the types of impolite acts which commenters engage in online, and expose conventionalized and non-conventionalized impoliteness triggers. It also seeks to explore the influence of computer-mediated contextual factors, such as anonymity and synchronicity on impoliteness. The study adopts Neurauter-Kessels’ framework (2011) to identify the types of face attacks and Culpeper’s bottom-up model (2011, 2016) of impoliteness triggers to classify impolite acts. The analysis shows that commenters engage in FTAs that are targeting the writers. The most frequent attack is the lack of balance, wholeness, fairness, and objectivity and the least frequent is being out of touch or having a lack of interaction with the audience. Commenters also employ both conventionalized and non-conventionalized impoliteness formulas in their face-attacks. Findings indicate that there are some distinctive features of Arabic impoliteness discourse, such as the use of colloquialisms, proverbs and idioms, religious expressions and interjections. The analysis also reveals that anonymity and asynchronicity are significant in accounting for the manifestation of impoliteness.
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