Impoliteness on Social Media

Abstract

This entry aims to chart the landscape of impoliteness research on social media. Impoliteness is conceptualized as a theoretical framework with which to capture discursive aggression. Impoliteness is prevalent across social media, facilitated by their affordances. A number of key issues and notions relevant to pragmatic research on social media impoliteness are addressed: forms of discursive aggression online (notably, hate speech and cyberbullying); emic/etic labeling of aggressive practices (e.g., via metapragmatic comments); appropriation or normalization of aggressive discourse; the contextually driven distinction between genuine aggression/impoliteness and overtly pretended aggression (i.e., mock impoliteness); and the diversity of reactions to impoliteness in public (and thus inherently, multi‐party) communication, which range from offense to humor experience.