Discours anti-immigration sur Twitter: discours sur l'autre et discours de haine

Abstract

Encouraged by the accessibility of media and social media, and reinforced by the variable contours of freedom of expression in various national legislations, hate speech permeates daily communications. Whether openly displayed or implicitly inferred from seemingly innocuous information, it creates a gap that subtly separates self from other. Its manifestations are diverse, yet its effect is consistent: elites, media, and citizens incessantly repeat and trivialize "small phrases" that insidiously propagate hate or rejection of others by caricaturing and depersonalizing them. Through the study of a corpus of tweets, this paper aims to analyze this linguistic avatar of what has been termed "neo-racism" or "elegant racism," and the cognitive fixation processes facilitated by hashtagging.