In 2017, the British ex-model Katie Price started a petition to make online abuse a specific criminal offence, after her son, Harvey, was a repeated victim of online abuse. Harvey was targeted over the colour of his skin, his size and, above all, his disabilities. Her petition attracted more than 220,000 signatures and also gained the support of a number of MPs. Before the Petitions Committee which considers public petitions presented to the UK House of Commons and, in 2018, was supposed to examine the impact of online abuse – especially on people with disabilities – she explained that when she reported the abusers to police, she was told there was little they could do since existing laws were not sufficient to provide protection, despite the increasing scale of online abuse. The issue received huge media coverage, it gave rise to debates on many digital media platforms, and it still hits the news since the Petitions Committee’s report (2019) found that self-regulation of social media has failed and social media are rife with degrading and dehumanising comments about disabled people. This study specifically takes into account the readers’ comments to the news reports published by some of the British tabloid newspapers (with the highest circulation rates over the last three years), namely The Sun, Daily Mail, and Daily Mirror, which hold a cultural and political significance in the country for “the particularly rich vistas they offer into British politics, society and culture” (Bingham and Conboy 2015: 20). The paper examines how readers addressed and responded to the issue reported and the proposal of a new law (Harvey’s law) making online abuse a criminal offence. Indeed, investigation of online interactions can provide insight into how discourses on specific events or tricky questions unfold and are linguistically construed. The corpus of comments will be analysed (Fairclough 2003; Carvalho 2008; Baker et al. 2013), to uncover the main patterns, thus exploring emerging societal attitudes towards disability and hate speech.
Online Abuse and Disability Hate Speech: A Discursive Analysis of Newspaper Comment Boards on Harvey’sLaw
Nisco
2020-01-01
Abstract
In 2017, the British ex-model Katie Price started a petition to make online abuse a specific criminal offence, after her son, Harvey, was a repeated victim of online abuse. Harvey was targeted over the colour of his skin, his size and, above all, his disabilities. Her petition attracted more than 220,000 signatures and also gained the support of a number of MPs. Before the Petitions Committee which considers public petitions presented to the UK House of Commons and, in 2018, was supposed to examine the impact of online abuse – especially on people with disabilities – she explained that when she reported the abusers to police, she was told there was little they could do since existing laws were not sufficient to provide protection, despite the increasing scale of online abuse. The issue received huge media coverage, it gave rise to debates on many digital media platforms, and it still hits the news since the Petitions Committee’s report (2019) found that self-regulation of social media has failed and social media are rife with degrading and dehumanising comments about disabled people. This study specifically takes into account the readers’ comments to the news reports published by some of the British tabloid newspapers (with the highest circulation rates over the last three years), namely The Sun, Daily Mail, and Daily Mirror, which hold a cultural and political significance in the country for “the particularly rich vistas they offer into British politics, society and culture” (Bingham and Conboy 2015: 20). The paper examines how readers addressed and responded to the issue reported and the proposal of a new law (Harvey’s law) making online abuse a criminal offence. Indeed, investigation of online interactions can provide insight into how discourses on specific events or tricky questions unfold and are linguistically construed. The corpus of comments will be analysed (Fairclough 2003; Carvalho 2008; Baker et al. 2013), to uncover the main patterns, thus exploring emerging societal attitudes towards disability and hate speech.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
