Hate Speech to Famous in Social Media: A Review on Twitter

Abstract

Social media platforms, which emerged with the existence of new media and defined as digital environments, offer users the right to participate and freedom of expression. These platforms, where ordinary or well-known people express themselves, express their feelings and thoughts, take their place in life as a public network. In addition to ordinary people, celebrities also share on these platforms quite often and try to reach their fans through these platforms, and at the same time share their feelings and thoughts. Celebrities, who have a large fan base and follower network, are sometimes the target of hateful speech by users with their posts. In this study, it is aimed to reveal the hate speech that the famous people who are known and known by the masses attract more attention with their words and are heavily exposed by the users due to their reputation in social media. In this context, the hate speech of users on social media towards celebrities was tried to be examined in this study. In the study, the celebrities who were on the agenda on Twitter in March 2022 and the tweets sent for them were discussed. Since the trend topics (agenda) on Twitter change instantaneously, the study was limited to celebrities who were trending topics within a month and were exposed to hate speech. In the study, phenomenology was used as a method and content analysis was used as a data collection technique. In this context, tweets with hateful content towards celebrities, which became the trend topic, were chosen by the purposeful sampling method. These tweets were subjected to content analysis analysis in terms of the number of replies, retweets and likes of other users and within the scope of Exaggeration/attribution/distortion, swearing/insult/humiliation, Enmity/war and Symbolization discourses in the hate category. In the light of the findings, it was concluded that celebrities are frequently exposed to hate speech containing insults, humiliation and hostility on Twitter by users for their posts or discourses.