Relocating Gender Stereotypes Online: Critical Analysis of Sexist Hate Speech in Selected Social Media

Abstract

The ever-increasing use of social media in African countries is celebrated as it has provided people with more spaces for dialogue and individual expressions. Whereas such ever-increasing of the accessibility and use of social media spaces offers users with freedom and democratic paradigms to comment, opine and debate on social, economic and political agenda, it has also resulted to increasing forms of sexist hateful speech. In so doing social media spaces have also changed the nature of communication, as a result, sexists appear to locate their discriminative voices in the new online spaces unlike in the traditional outlets and mainstream forums. This form of sexist hate speech incites gendered stereotypes of whom women often receive the extremes of the malpractices because of prevalence of patriarchal social set ups in most African societies. In most cases in Africa, sexist hate speech will be used as a weapon of gender-based violence means to bully women into silence and to maintain men's privileges. By using Content Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis approaches, this study analyzed the linguistic clues of the sexist hate speech in Facebook and Instagram social networks. On the basis of selected open accounts of Tanzanian public figures and celebrities, this study particularly observed and interrogated on how language of the users embeds ideological and social construct in order to perpetuate and exacerbate gender inequality. The study partly examined sexist hate speech in the selected Russian social media to comparatively study how sexism is construed and perceived in the community.

Message patterns of online gender-based humor discriminatory practices biases stereotyping and disempowering tools through discourse analysis

“…Gender stereotyping in language use. The implication supports Eagly (1999) expands the issue on stereotypes in social dynamics, where gender stereotyping is not really content-neutral since reflect power and status imbalances that favor the males and are associated with the social performances (Elias and Gurbanova, 2018;Jamshed et al, 2022;Peters et al, 2015) and roles that go with their perceived traits, including those who are in power and those in the mass segment of the society (students and those not in authority), stereotypes in the gender-based humors (Cantor and Zillman, 1973) represented the message for language that demean or underestimate character and qualities of the compared genders (mostly women and the LGBT). In the long run, it is an important move to clarify through language campaigns the levels of stereotyping where it already endangers the images of certain genders being forwarded by the gender-based jokes (González-Cabrera et al, 2018;Selkie et al, 2016).…”

“…Sexist jokes, for example, have been used to discriminate against people based on their gender orientation, identity, and roles, and they are sometimes disguised as comedies or jokes that others may overlook. Language choices in regular speech that are sexist perpetuate gender stereotypes of men as capable and women as communal (Elias and Gurbanova, 2018;Menegatti and Rubini, 2017). Because of the nature of social media, people's attitudes have evolved, allowing for discrimination in comments and dialogues across the mechanisms of virtual engagement (Herry and Mulvey, 2022).…”

Legal Testing on Hate Speech Through Social Media

“…On the basis of selected open accounts of Tanzanian public figures and celebrities, this study particularly observed and interrogated on how language of the users embeds ideological and social construct in order to perpetuate and exacerbate gender inequality. The study partly examined sexist hate speech in the selected Russian social media to comparatively study how sexism is construed and perceived in the community [6].…”

An Analysis of Hate Speech Tweets Against Women from a Socio-cognitive Discourse Perspective

“…It also revolved around different types of discrimination and gender prejudice hidden in discourse and suggested the use of effective educational tools which tackle this serious issue so that women can have a respectful conversation online. Elias & Gurbanova (2018) analyzed the linguistic features of sexist hate speech on social media in the Tanzanian context. They discovered how gender preconceptions are reflected in social media conversation.…”