A Qualitative Exploration of Hate Speech Manifestation in Afghanistan’s Twitter-Sphere
Abstract
The proliferation of hate speech on social media in recent years has become a public concern. This infodemic not only tears apart intergroup relationships and poses adverse psychological consequences but can also instigate violence and hate crimes. Due to hate speech perplexity and multi-dimensionality across different cultures and languages, researchers have called for worldwide investigations into its cross-language identification and manifestation. Employing a corpus of 536,080 characters and 68,975 tokens in Persian and Pashtu languages, a dataset from Twitter, this study explored the causes and manifestations of hate speech among Twitter users in Afghanistan through a qualitative investigation. The findings showed that real-life conflictual events are the primary source of hate speech among Afghanistan’s Twitter users. Political instability and sectarianism, coupled with the traumatic experience of war, violence, and injustice in the past, resulted in profound public grievances being reflected on social media. The study also noted that hate speech is manifested in four main ways: gender-based, racial/ethnic, political, and religious hate speech. The results highlight the need for governments to tackle the underlying real-world hate-fueling problems to lessen their adverse effects on individuals and society online. The research implications and relevant suggestions are also discussed at the end of the article.
Keywords: Afghanistan, hate speech, media affordance, national identity, Twitter.
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