Twitter After Charlie Hebdo: A Taxonomy Of Violent Communication In Cyberspace

• In Event: Hate is in the Air: Defining, Identifying and Understanding Hate Speech and Radicalization Speech in Cyberspace

Abstract

The attack against the Charlie Hebdo weekly in Paris, the year 2015 was a disruptive event that generated an important public reaction in social networks, creating the opportunity to study the phenomenon of violent communication and hate messages in Twitter. In the days after the attack (between January 7 and January 12) a sample of more than 255.000 tweets with the hashtags #CharlieHebdo, #JeSuisCharlie and #StopIslam was collected. An analysis was made using qualitative and quantitative approaches. First, messages were classified either in tweets that contained violence and hate speech or general messages. Then, three pairs of judges classified the sample using the excluding criteria previously defined, according to which were identified ten types of violent speech communication that were reduced to five essential categories. After the qualitative analysis, methods of Data Mining were used with the purpose of extracting systems of rules for the classification of the type of speech, beginning with 18 variables derived from each tweet. The results show that disruptive events are followed by communications that show spatial temporal and textual patterns clearly identifiable; this allows this article to propose a methodology to classify in a precise way those messages that contain hate or violent speech.

Authors

• Fernando Miró Llinares, Universidad Miguel Hernández de Elche

• Elena Beatriz Fernández Castejón, Universidad Miguel Hernández