Covert hate speech: Humiliating with contemptuous remarks

This article explores online public discourse that results in humiliation; focusing especially on the emotion of contempt, which we suggest is at the heart of covert hate speech. The research worked on Greek Cypriot data comprising online comments posted under mainstream articles focused on immigration and the non-heterosexual community. Computer Assisted Discourse Analysis (CADS) was used – an approach that combines critical discourse analysis and linguistics. We focus on the tropes used in negative comments, including metaphor and irony. These tropes make it possible to both humiliate the subject and to convince the audience, by categorizing and constructing non-heterosexual people and non-natives as being socially, sexually or ontologically deviant. Contempt plays an important argumentative role in this recategorization, because this emotion is characterized by the rejection of the Other as being in a lower class and the construction of the Self as being in a higher class. This process is typical of an ideological opposition that has been described as part of a process called “social alienation”, and it can lead to the perceived dehumanization of the individuals targeted by these discourses.