Hate speech and Cyberbullying through Language:  a case of Twitter hashtags during Covid19 — The Association Specialists

Hate speech and Cyberbullying through Language:  a case of Twitter hashtags during Covid19 (19298)

Munirah AlAjlan 1
  1. Kuwait University, Kuwait, SELECT ONE

 

This paper investigates the case of racism against expats in Kuwait during the Corona virus pandemic through Twitter hashtags. Unfortunately, the humanity faces new forms of hate along with evolution. With the beginning of the social media exposure, people have used the internet to practice their ways of cyberbullying. Twitter is a very known social media platform, where users can express themselves. The overall purpose of investigating this case is to analyze the relationship between Covid19 and hate speech hashtags against expats in Kuwait. To support this correlation, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is employed to analyzing the tweets. In this paper, the data has been collected from a qualitative articles, collective texts, and social practices through Twitter. Around 250 tweets were collected in this paper during the period of the pandemic where all forms of hate hashtags were exhibited. All tweets were annotated manually and inserted into Excel sheet, then labelled with different categories. The results revealed that Covid19 has a direct impact on the increase of hate hashtags on Twitter. The implications of this study could be used to raise awareness of using Twitter hashtags and be helpful for those who are studying the Corona virus impact on expats on social media. Keeping in mind that a life of a human being could be affected in so many ways by those hate speech hashtags.