The rhetoric of digital hate speech against women journalists: Drawing from experiences of harassment in Portugal

Abstract

Digital hate speech is a transversal phenomenon in contemporary societies. On social platforms, participatory spaces and private messages are important vehicles for its conveyance. Women journalists constitute one of the social groups most targeted by the whole phenomenon, as it is embodied and operationalized through digital harassment. This study seeks to explore 31 experiences of harassment of women journalists in Portugal, to identify and analyze the rhetorical categories that constitute the argumentation of digital hate speech. Combining rhetorical analysis with qualitative content analysis by inductive method, accusation, victim condemnation, insults, journalistic skills, intelligence and merit, and sexual objectification emerged. In the second part, the categories served the quantitative content analysis of the corpus (N = 5026) constituted by tweets, retweets and replies on Twitter profiles of 13 non-participating women journalists from the first moment of the investigation. The results show that hate speech has a public expression of 13.9% in Portugal (N = 701).