First-Person Verbal Aggression in YouTube Comments

Abstract

To contribute to literature on hateful speech in social media communication, this chapter analyses verbal aggression in YouTube comments. Our text data is the 21.8-million-word Sexism subcorpus of the netlang corpus of YouTube comments. In order to identify instances where YouTube commenters explicitly suggest their personal involvement in carrying out physical violence, we analyse aggression verbs in constructions with the first-person singular subject pronoun (e.g., I slap, I kill). Through manual classification of the instances based on their target and function, we lay out a taxonomy of how aggression verbs are used in online comments and compare the various functions associated with the studied aggression verbs. We find that the pattern with the first-person singular subject and aggression verb frequently indicates the commenter's subjective aggressive perspective towards the target. The aggression verb constructions are used in threats and threatening wishes targeting specific individuals rather than vulnerable groups, and threatening language contributes to the online norm of aggressive language.