“Real men don’t hate women”:Twitter rape threats and group identity

On 24th July 2013, feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez's petition to the Bank of England to have Elizabeth Fry's image on the UK's £5 note replaced with the image of another woman was successful. The petition challenged the Bank of England's original plan to replace Fry with Winston Churchill, which would have meant that no woman aside from the Queen would be represented on any UK banknote. Following this, Criado-Perez was subjected to ongoing misogynistic abuse on Twitter, a microblogging social network, including threats of rape and death. This paper investigates this increasingly prominent phenomenon of rape threats made via social networks. Specifically, we investigate the sustained period of abuse directed towards the Twitter account of feminist campaigner and journalist, Caroline Criado-Perez. We then turn our attention to the formation of online discourse communities as they respond to and participate in forms of extreme online misogyny on Twitter. We take a corpus of 76,275 tweets collected during a three month period in which the events occurred (July to September 2013), which comprises 912,901 words. We then employ an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of language in the context of this social network. Our approach combines quantitative approaches from the fields of corpus linguistics to detect emerging discourse communities, and then qualitative approaches from discourse analysis to analyse how these communities construct their identities

“I refuse to respond to this obvious troll":an overview of responses to (perceived) trolling

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) provides many benefits, including quick, efficient communication over time and space. At the same time, however, the anonymity it offers can give a sense of impunity, an illusion that behaviour is less hurtful than it really is, and a suppression of empathy. In short, CMC can be a fertile ground for conflict, and one particular manifestation of this is trolling. Trolling involves deliberately attacking others online, typically for amusement's sake. In some cases, it can be taken to such an extreme that it clearly violates UK legislation on hate-speech, abuse and menace. Whilst forensic linguistic research into threatening and abusive language is, however, gradually growing (Carney, 2014; Chakraborti, 2010: 99–123; and Fraser, 1998), there is a shortage of research into linguistic aggression online, and particularly research into trolling (see, however, Binns, 2011; Herring et al., 2002; and Shin, 2008). In endeavouring to contribute to this under-researched area, this paper seeks to address the question, ‘How do users respond to (perceived) trolling?’ The answer to this is elaborated through the creation of a working taxonomy of response types, drawn from 3,727 examples of user discussions and accusations of trolling which were extracted from an eighty-six million word Usenet corpus. I conclude this paper by discussing the limitations and applications of this research

Pro-vaccination personal narratives in response to online hesitancy about the HPV vaccine: The challenge of tellability

Experimental studies have shown that narratives can be effective persuasive tools in addressing vaccine hesitancy, including regarding the vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV), which is transmitted via sexual contact and can cause cervical cancer. This paper presents an analysis of a thread from the online parenting forum Mumsnet Talk where an initially undecided Original Poster is persuaded to vaccinate their child against HPV by a respondent’s narrative of cervical cancer that they describe as difficult to share. This paper considers this particular narrative alongside all other narratives that precede the decision announced on the Mumsnet thread. It shows how producing pro-vaccination narratives about HPV involves challenges regarding ‘tellability’ – what makes the events in a narrative reportable or worth telling. We suggest that this has implications for the context-dependent nature of tellability, the role of parenting forums in vaccination-related discussions, and narrative-based communication about vaccinations more generally

Narratives, Information and Manifestations of Resistance to Persuasion in Online Discussions of HPV Vaccination

There are both theoretical accounts and empirical evidence for the fact that, in health communication, narratives (story telling) may have a persuasive advantage when compared with information (the provision of facts). The dominant explanation for this potential advantage is that narratives inhibit people’s resistance to persuasion, particularly in the form of counterarguing. Evidence in this area to date has most often been gathered through lab or field experiments. In the current study we took a novel approach, gathering our data from naturally-occurring, non-experimental and organically evolving online interactions about vaccinations. We focus on five threads from the parenting forum Mumsnet Talk that centered on indecision about the HPV vaccination. Our analysis revealed that narratives and information were used by posters in similar quantities as a means of providing vaccination-related advice. We also found similar frequencies of direct engagement with both narratives and information. However, our findings showed that narratives resulted in a significantly higher proportion of posts exhibiting supportive engagement, whereas information resulted in posts exhibiting a significantly higher proportion of challenges, including counterarguing and other manifestations of posters’ resistance to persuasion. The proportions of supportive versus challenging engagement also varied depending on the topic and vaccine stance of narratives. Notwithstanding contextual explanations for these patterns, our findings, based on this original approach of using naturalistic data, provide a novel kind of evidence for the potential of narratives to inhibit counterarguing in authentic health-related discourse

Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication: From user discussions to academic definitions

Whilst computer-mediated communication (CMC) can benefit users by providing quick and easy communication between those separated by time and space, it can also provide varying degrees of anonymity that may encourage a sense of impunity and freedom from being held accountable for inappropriate online behaviour. As such, CMC is a fertile ground for studying impoliteness, whether it occurs in response to perceived threat (flaming), or as an end in its own right (trolling). Currently, first and secondorder definitions of terms such as im/politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987; Bousfield 2008; Culpeper 2008; Terkourafi 2008), in-civility (Lakoff 2005), rudeness (Beebe 1995, Kienpointner 1997, 2008), and etiquette (Coulmas 1992), are subject to much discussion and debate, yet the CMC phenomenon of trolling is not adequately captured by any of these terms. Following Bousfield (in press), Culpeper (2010) and others, this paper suggests that a definition of trolling should be informed first and foremost by user discussions. Taking examples from a 172-million-word, asynchronous CMC corpus, four interrelated conditions of aggression, deception, disruption, and success are discussed. Finally, a working definition of trolling is presented

Study on comprehensive policy review of anti-trafficking projects funded by the European Commission:HOME/2014/ISFP/PR/THBX/0052

This report addresses four objectives: 1. To conduct a comprehensive review of European Commission (EC) funded anti-trafficking projects so as to enhance coordination, avoid duplication and provide a solid basis for coherent, cost-effective and strategic planning, including potentially for the further development of anti-trafficking policies at EU level, thereby supporting the dual aims of enhanced coordination and cooperation among key actors and policy coherence. 2. To map and analyse the distribution of EC-funded anti-trafficking projects according to their scope of intervention, geographic areas of intervention, fields, actors, target beneficiaries, funding level, types of output, policy recommendations and other relevant aspects. 3. To identify and assess the common, unique or complementary contribution of the impact and results of these funded projects to the objectives of the EU anti-trafficking strategy, including whether their contribution has yet been taken into account. 4. To identify trends, emerging research and policy question

Metaphor, impoliteness, and offence in online communication

What role might figurative language play in utterances that are designed to threaten or cause offence? In this chapter we tackle this question, against the backdrop of social practices around computer-mediated communication (CMC), by combining evidence in metaphor and impoliteness research. This combination is necessary because of the relative absence of studies investigating the role of metaphor in offence more broadly

"Uh.....not to be nitpicky,,,,,but...the past tense of drag is dragged, not drug.":an overview of trolling strategies

This paper investigates the phenomenon known as trolling — the behaviour of being deliberately antagonistic or offensive via computer-mediated communication (CMC), typically for amusement’s sake. Having previously started to answer the question, what is trolling? (Hardaker 2010), this paper seeks to answer the next question, how is trolling carried out? To do this, I use software to extract 3,727 examples of user discussions and accusations of trolling from an eighty-six million word Usenet corpus. Initial findings suggest that trolling is perceived to broadly fall across a cline with covert strategies and overt strategies at each pole. I create a working taxonomy of perceived strategies that occur at different points along this cline, and conclude by refining my trolling definition