Verbreitungsmechanismen schädigender Sprache im Netz: Anatomie zweier Shitstorms

In this working paper, we turn our attention to two exemplary, cross-media shitstorms directed against well-known individuals from the business world. Both have in common, first, the trigger, a controversial statement by the person who thereby becomes the target of the shitstorm, and second, the identity of this target as relatively privileged: cis-male, white, successful. We examine the spread of the outrage wave across two media at a time and test the applicability of computational linguistic methods for analyzing its time course. Assuming that harmful language spreads like a virus in digital space, we are primarily interested in the events and constellations that lead to the use of harmful language, and whether and how a linguistic formation of "tribes" occurs. Our research therefore focuses, first, on the distribution of linguistic features within the overall shitstorm: are individual words or phrases increasingly used after their introduction, and through which pathways they spread. Second, we ask whether "tribes," for example, one group of supporters and one of opponents of the target, have a distinguished linguistic form. Our hypothesis is that supporters remain equally active over time, while the dynamic "ripple" effect of the shitstorm is based on the varying participation of opponents.